Ironport Systems reports image-link spam as next online threat wave

Company News

New Delhi, May 25

IronPort Systems, Inc., a leading provider of anti-spam, anti-virus and anti-spyware appliances for business, has reported a new security threat wave that is targeting customers especially in the Small-Medium Businesses (SMB) segment. With the advent of heightened security software employed by corporates today, Spammers have innovated with newer methodologies of attacking networks. “Image-Link Spam” creates a link to the image with a URL in the message unlike conventional image spamming. This trend is sweeping across the entire spammer community and has found favor with cyber miscreants within the country. Conventional security filters are unable to recognize these links as spam, hence allowing them to bypass existing security systems.

“We have noticed that since late April this year, Image-link spam has grown to become the next big wave for online security threats. Spammers are sending bogus messages to customers and attaching URL links, which causes both mailboxes and networks to get jammed,” said Ambarish Deshpande, Director, IronPort Systems, India and SAARC. “In fact “image-link” spam now represents 4% of spam volumes worldwide,” he added.

In order to combat this phenomenon, IronPort has through its SenderBase Network, managed to tackle this problem in real time. The SenderBase Network essentially assigns a score to every URL in a message based on its likelihood to send spam. 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-link spam.

“IronPort has so far been able to effectively protect its customers against image link spam with a 98% catch rate and near zero false positives, said Ambarish Deshpande.

IronPort has also recently revamped it’s SenderBase website (www.senderbase.org), which will allow customers to tackle image-link spam, by offering online help, software downloads etc.

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