Antivirus News

BOSTON - Security software maker Trend Micro has developed technology to help thwart a form of spam that’s tough to crack: e-mail sent in the form of scanned images, a senior executive said Friday.

Spam filters are generally efficient in scanning ordinary text messages as computers can search quickly for specific words or word patterns, which serve as red flags in identifying junk mail.

But spammers have learned to get around those programs by using imaging software to essentially make copies of text messages and turn them into graphic images that cannot be scanned using conventional methods.

About 40 percent of all spam messages are image-based, compared with about 10 percent a year ago, according to McAfee Inc another software company that specializes in Internet security.

Trend Micro plans to introduce software in the first quarter of 2007 next year to allow companies to scan image-based spam without requiring huge amounts of processing power that can slow down email traffic.

“We believe it addresses most types of image spam that we’re seeing in the world today,” Trend Micro Director of Product Development Paul Moriarty said in an interview.

The company filed a U.S. patent application related to the technology in the middle of November, Moriarty said.

Analysts said that to detect graphics-based spam, companies currently need to use optical character recognition programs to convert those images back into text for scanning.

That process can be time-consuming and tax the resources of corporate computer networks, said Andrew Jaquith, a computer security analyst with technology researcher Yankee Group.

“It’s very processor-intensive. It’s not an easy thing. You’ve got to crack the image open. You’ve got to look at a lot of bytes,” Jaquith said.

Trend Micro declined to say how its new software will handle that technology challenge.
By: Jim Finkle

First it was spam, now it is phishing. Following months of reports about rocketing levels of junk emails, the Anti-Phishing Working Group has revealed that the number of phishing sites has also demonstrated well beyond average growth this autumn. The APWG released a combined September-October report this month, which shows that there has been a 757% increase in the number of active phishing sites between October 2005 and 2006.

The US continues to be the top phishing site hosting country with 28.78%. The top three are, as usual, also made up of China and the Republic of Korea. Australia also maintains its presence in top ten list, where it has been since July this year, while India makes its first return since June. Despite the record number of phishing sites, however, the total number of phishing reports received in the first two autumn months has not reached the peak numbers that were set earlier in the year. Juneâ??s record of 28,571 attacks have not been surpassed so far, although Octoberâ??s figure is the second highest of all times.

At the same time, a Microsoft representative has recently claimed that phishing may not be at the cutting edge of cybercrime for much longer, with organised crime groups now more interested in mass attacks against businesses rather than private individuals. In an interview given to ZDNet, Ed Gibson, chief security advisor to Microsoft UK, has said that cybercrime syndicates now prefer to use large botnets for launching DoS attacks and then blackmail their victims. Extortion can definitely be big business at the moment: earlier this autumn a gang of cybercriminals has been jailed in Saratov, Russia for extorting more than $4 million out of British and Irish online bookmakers and casinos between 2003 and 2004.