Worldwide spam volumes have doubled from last year, according to Ironport, a spam filtering firm, and unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than 9 of every 10 e-mail messages sent over the Internet.
Much of that flood is made up of a nettlesome new breed of junk e-mail called image spam, in which the words of the advertisement are part of a picture, often fooling traditional spam detectors that look for telltale phrases. Image spam increased fourfold from last year and now represents 25 to 45 percent of all junk e-mail, depending on the day, Ironport says.
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Antispam companies fought the scourge successfully, for a time, with a blend of three filtering strategies. Their software scanned each e-mail and looked at whom the message was coming from, what words it contained and which Web sites it linked to. The new breed of spam call it Spam 2.0 poses a serious challenge to each of those three approaches.
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The Securities and Exchange Commission has brought dozens of cases against such fraudsters over the years. But as a result of the Can-Spam Act, which forced domestic e-mail marketers to either give up the practice or risk jail, most active spammers now operate beyond the reach of American law enforcement. Antispam researchers say the current spam hot spots are in Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia.
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Some antispam veterans are not optimistic about the future of the spam battle. As an industry I think we are losing, Mr. Peterson of Ironport said. The bad guys are simply outrunning most of the technology out there today.
