Conventionally, spam is known for flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes etc. In spite of the most advanced security software employed by companies today, spammers have come up with a new methodology to attack networks. This works by linking spam with images that can cause both mailboxes and networks to get jammed.
Unlike conventional image spamming, ‘image-link spam’ adopts an innovative route to create a link to the image with URL in the message. This method is gaining popularity in the spammer community and among the cyber miscreants. It is emerging very fast as a grave security threat to the web users since april 2007 and constitutes of 4% of the spam volume worldwide.
In order to combat this problem in real time, IronPort Systems, a provider of anti-spams, anti-virus and anti-spyware for businesses has evolved a senderBase network. The network assigns a score to every URL in a message based on its likelyhood to send spams. This web reputation score is then combined with other message information and rule hits to determine the overall IPAS score of a message, thereby blocking any emails containing image-links spams.
