Paul Judge

Today one out of four emails on the internet is an image spam message. This is not because spammers have just realized the marketing benefits of captive colors. Instead, this is because the spammers have identified a weakness in many anti-spam systems and are moving diligently to maximize this opportunity by fully exploiting this weakness.

Today one out of four emails on the internet is an image spam message. This is not because spammers have just realized the marketing benefits of captive colors. Instead, this is because the spammers have identified a weakness in many anti-spam systems and are moving diligently to maximize this opportunity by fully exploiting this weakness.

In August 2005, the levees in New Orleans fought hard to withstand the pressure, but the volume of water was simply more than they were designed to handle. The destruction that resulted has been well documented, and one year later we are still seeing the effects of the storm. While the destruction caused by spam does not equal the devastation seen in New Orleans, email systems around the world face a surge of spam that is many times what the systems were architected to handle. The result of this overload is email downtime and lost messages resulting in the disruption of business and personal communications.