Image Spam- Antivirus companies cant handle image spam

Image spam-what is image spam

Image spam typically refers to email spam where the "text" in the email is actually image spam, where the email consist of a single link to the image, which consists of a spam message

Image spam makes keyword based spam prevention techniques obsolete

Image spams consist of no keywords, in fact,email spams consist of no text except a typical link to a spam image

Image spam is undetectable by standard email spam detection techniques, since email spam detection techniques rely typically on keywords in the email, and image spam have almost no keywords to analyze

Image spam leaves antivirus and anti-spam software useless

Due to the inherent features of image spam, antivirus and anti-spam software are rendered useless by image spam and antivirus software companies such as Symantec are almost clueless about detecting image spam

Ways to combat image spam

Some ways for antivirus software companies to combat image spam

• Image spam combat using CAPTCHA technologies.This anti image spam technique needs to utilized by email vendors and antispam software vendors.Captcha can combat email spam since CAPTCHA uses the funny wavy characters to distinguish between legitimate human sent email and robot based email image spam


• Image spam combat using behavioral anti-spam techniques-Antivirus anti-spam software companies need to use more behavioral anti-spam techniques to combat image spam to study the typical characteristics of email spam. This behavioral characteristics of email spam are then used to combat at least the typical email scams