June 4 2007 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Messaging and Web security services provider MessageLabs (messagelabs.com) announced on Monday that it has released the findings of its MessageLabs Intelligence Report for May 2007, which reveals an increase in spam spikes.
This month saw a rise in virus and phishing rates, and while spam rates decreased overall, MessageLabs identified new image spam techniques using image hosting sites. In one spam spike that lasted only 11 hours, more than 10,000 spam messages were attempted, accounting for more than 75 percent of the total messages received by the domain during the entire period.
“This month the bad guys continued with their aggressive attacks by developing new tactics to fly under the radar and cause the most damage,” says Mark Sunner, chief security analyst for MessageLabs. “With the increase in spam spikes and new techniques with image spam, it is crucial for businesses to take a multi-layered security approach among email, Web and IM to protect their employees and their systems completely from these malicious attacks.”
Analysis of this month’s data showed that spammers continue to innovate and use new methods to evade popular anti-spam solutions. Instead of embedding images in the body of an email message, spammers are now hosting images on sites that do not require registration and include links to those sites or an HTML image in the email message. The group using this new image spam technique is the same group behind the recent abuse of Imageshack. MessageLabs predicts that without registration requirements or validation of image sources on such hosting sites, this scheme will continue.
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