Commentary
Barracuda Attacks Image-Based Spam
Yesterday Barracuda Networks announced an upgrade to its Spam Firewall product that provides the ability to apply optical character recognition, or OCR, techniques to incoming e-mail. This is an important escalation in the spam/anti-spam arms race, and something that will hopefully become more common.
Yesterday Barracuda Networks announced an upgrade to its Spam Firewall product that provides the ability to apply optical character recognition, or OCR, techniques to incoming e-mail. This is an important escalation in the spam/anti-spam arms race, and something that will hopefully become more common.According to the press release, "as much as 25 percent of all spam messages contain images," and from a quick survey of my mail logs, that figure pretty well jibed with what I saw there. Heck, 7% of the mail to hit my server today contained an image and nothing else. I can punish the GIF-only mail easily enough with regular expressions, but the mixed-mode spam is much more troublesome. Fortunately, techniques like the one announced by Barracuda should help alleviate some of these problems.
It'll be interesting to see how well this works. This is something that has been talked about in various anti-spam groups for a while, but as far as I know nobody has productized it until now. I'm going to assume that Barracuda has done some internal testing on this already and has determined that the processing demands aren't terribly excessive--and since Barracuda relies largely on SpamAssassin and other open-source technologies, the cost burden is probably next to nil, too--so we ought to start seeing this appearing elsewhere in short order.
More Internet Insights
White Papers
- Creating the Enterprise-Class Tablet Environment - by Yankee Group
- How To Regain IT Control In An Increasingly Mobile World - by BlackBerry
Reports
- How Google+, Facebook Impact Corporate Strategy: Social Media and IT at a Crossroads
- Strategy: Enterprise Social Network Buyer's Guide
Webcasts
- Maximize ROI with Database Consolidation onto Private Clouds
- Outsourcing Security: What Every Potential Cloud Security Customer Should Know
Related Reading
 |
To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy. |
|
T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting! |
Subscribe to RSSResource Links
This Week's Issue
Technology Whitepapers
- Mobile BI: Actionable Intelligence for the Agile Enterprise
- Creating the Enterprise-Class Tablet Environment - by Yankee Group
- The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet's Good Bones - by BlackBerry
- Red Alert: Why Tablet Security Matters - by BlackBerry
- New Visual and Wizard-Driven Paradigms for Exploring Data and Developing Analytic Workflows
Featured Resource
Solution Brief: Customer Benefits of the New Blue Coat WebFilter Categories
Download this whitepaper and find out how to easily manage web content by categorizing it into a discrete number of categories.
Learn More
Download this whitepaper and find out how to easily manage web content by categorizing it into a discrete number of categories.
Learn More
