Porn spammers sneak images into Outlook

Spinner

Being a recent convert to Outlook 2003, my ears pricked up to this news. It would seem spammers have found a way to bypass Outlook 2003's anti-spam security by embedding pornographic images into their emails. Joy.

In order to help fight spam, Microsoft armed Outlook 2003 with a Bayesian filter, which tries to recognise unsolicited messages by examining the words used and, depending on the frequency of certain key words, calculating the probability of that e-mail being spam.

The company also improved on previous versions of Outlook by allowing users to choose if an HTML email should be allowed to access the Internet and download content. This gives the user a chance to prevent the pornography from ever reaching his or her PC.

However, John Cheney, chief executive of email-security firm BlackSpider Technologies, explained that one of the growing trends is for spammers to attach a pornographic image file to their emails and then use HTML code to display the attached image. This means that Outlook doesn't need to access the Internet before displaying the picture.

Source: Zdnet

Dequan

In Outlook I use integrated bayesian spam filter Spam Bully. Is not free but catches 99% of my spam so I'm happy with it, it does a great job. It uses baysian filtering to filter out spam and is easy to train..

TheBaron

Dequan wrote:

In Outlook I use integrated bayesian spam filter Spam Bully. Is not free but catches 99% of my spam so I'm happy with it, it does a great job. It uses baysian filtering to filter out spam and is easy to train..

sounds nice. i dont get much spam, and i use thunderbird anyway

bothered

Spinner wrote:

Being a recent convert to Outlook 2003, my ears pricked up to this news. It would seem spammers have found a way to bypass Outlook 2003's anti-spam security by embedding pornographic images into their emails. Joy.

You naughty Spinner you!