Last September’s demise of long suspected malware host Intercage may have decreased spam by 8 percent in one month, but spammers are finding new tricks to keep up their trade. In fact, a recent report shows that nine out of every ten emails are spam.

The report, released by Symantec’s MessageLabs security research arm, shows a 5.1 percent increase in spam from April to May alone. This means that it’s becoming harder and harder to stop spammers from clogging up the Internet.

Spammers are poking holes in the ways that systems can stop or detect them. The two trends making it easier for spammers to thrive on the Web are improved tools for breaking CAPTCHA authentication methods and social networking sites that allow users to upload files.

CAPTCHA authentication is when you’re presented with a fuzzy image that you have to discern before logging into a site. Most major email providers use CAPTCHA to weed out spammers when they’re registering new accounts.

However automated tools for discerning the CAPTCHA images have improved, allowing spammers to create new email accounts automatically. The spammers set up a script to generate new email accounts to send their messages from.

The other trend that spammers are capitalizing on to evade detection is the prevalence of social networking sites. These sites allow users to upload files and are often used by spammers to store malware.

By hosting their infected programs on social networking sites, these spammers blend in with the normal activity on the site. Instead of blocking the entire Web site, security vendors must find other ways to help users avoid infection on these sites.

The good news is that spam filters have gotten fairly good at sorting spam messages out of our inboxes. While this helps the symptom, spam isn’t going away until the legal system stops letting spammers off based on their first amendment rights.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 10:33 am under Scams, Social Media, Spam.

Read more entries by Dave Jeyes.
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