Barracuda nets image-based spam

Responding to the increasing amount of image spam now traversing the Internet, Barracuda Networks Wednesday announced downloads for its e-mail security appliances to help block this latest nuisance.

Image spam is unwanted e-mail in which text is embedded in an image to foil traditional spam filters that catch spam by scanning messages for key words and by using other text-based techniques. Barracuda says that approximately 25% of all unwanted e-mail today is image-based spam.

The company’s new downloads use optical character recognition (OCR) and fingerprint analysis to catch image-based spam, according to officials.

The OCR feature recognizes the embedded text and coverts it to data so it can be scanned like any other piece of e-mail. The fingerprint analysis feature scans spam messages caught in Barracuda’s honeypot network and breaks them down into components, assigning unique identifiers to each portion so they can be easily recognized. The software then compares incoming messages to this database of image-based spam fingerprints and flags those that match, officials say.

The OCR and fingerprint analysis updates are available now for free to customers of Barracuda’s Spam Firewall appliances. The company’s enterprise version, designed for organizations with up to 25,000 users, is priced starting at $29,999 plus $6,599 for update services.