Barracuda Networks Sees Significant Spike in Spam over Past Three Months.

Increase in Image-Based Spam and Penny Stock Promotions Make up Bulk of Spam in Recent Months

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Barracuda Networks, Inc., the leading provider of enterprise-class application security appliances, today announced it has seen a more than 67 percent increase in overall spam volume and a 500 percent increase in image spam since August. This increase is attributed to a number of trends, including a significant uptake in the number of penny stock promotions that Barracuda Central, an advanced technology operations center where engineers continuously monitor the Internet for trends in spam and virus attacks, has seen hitting the millions of inboxes of its more than 35,000 customers worldwide.

"The observed increase in the volume of trading of penny stocks that are hyped in spam emails provides significant financial motivation for speculators to send this type of spam," said Stephen Pao, vice president of product management for Barracuda Networks, adding that the volume of other forms of spam messages have also recently increased, including messages pitching diet pills and other drugs. "Across the board, we are observing more spam and more sophistication in sending the spam."

Marked Increases in Text Spam Messages

Simple-text messages can be difficult to detect and block because they are created to look like a legitimate text email. The volume of text spam has particularly increased with the popularity of stock spam because these forms of spam are particularly well-suited for text-only email. The call to action is simply to transact a stock; therefore these emails need not reveal their intent through embedded URLs or HTML tags.

Stopping text-only spam generally requires a rapid tactical response. Obfuscating text spam usually involves misspelling key words or randomly inserting unrelated phrases to throw off spam filters. Sophisticated spammers generally design and test their messages against the current spam definitions of popular spam filters. Therefore, blocking these spam messages engineered to pass through filters requires both early detection of an outbreak and rapid deployment of mitigation strategies.

Through both honeypots and a distributed network of over 35,000 Barracuda Spam Firewalls in the field that submit spam samples, Barracuda Central has leveraged its scale and its presence to combat the amplified incidence of simple-text spam messages over the past three months.

Image Spam on the Rise

In addition, Barracuda Networks reports a considerable climb in the volume of image-based spam, a trend that began more than six months ago and which the Barracuda Spam Firewall includes strong measures of protection against. Because developing stock spam that can pass through popular spam filters often requires the spammer to degrade the readability of the messages, stock spam also makes up a significant percentage of image spam. Using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) techniques, and unique fingerprint methods, the Barracuda Spam Firewall has an effectiveness rating of more than 93 percent against image-based spam.

"Image-based spam has created problems for many solutions that do not have the comprehensive feature set needed to protect against it," said Pao. "Because we saw this growing trend early on, we were able to fully equip the Barracuda Spam Firewall against it and as such, our customers are benefiting from a very low incidence of image-based spam getting through to their inboxes."

In the past three months Barracuda Central has recorded a nearly 500 percent increase in image-based spam. In a large number of these cases, many of these images also contain text. Using OCR, the Barracuda Spam Firewall can identify this text, convert it to data and then give it a score based on specific rule sets developed by engineers at Barracuda Central.

Barracuda Networks also developed methods to uniquely fingerprint components of spam messages, including images. Barracuda Central collects these spam fingerprints from honeypots as well as from thousands of Barracuda Spam Firewalls belonging to customers who opt-in to submit spam messages for analysis. Using this vast database of spam fingerprints, the Barracuda Spam Firewall's new fingerprint analysis can profile message components of new spam emails against known spam fingerprints and automatically block, quarantine, or tag messages based on a match. Fingerprint analysis is capable of blocking image spam regardless of whether images contain text. In the past three months, Barracuda Networks has upgraded fingerprint analysis numerous times in order to ensure its effectiveness rating against image-based spam remains above 93 percent.

"Barracuda Networks is committed to making sure that the Barracuda Spam Firewall is staying ahead of the trends, whether it is an increase in text spam, image spam, or new, emerging techniques," said Pao. "We will continue to provide the most robust feature set designed specifically to deal with the ever-changing spam variants that are out there."

About Barracuda Networks, Inc.

Barracuda Networks is the leading provider of enterprise-class application security appliances for comprehensive email, Internet and IM protection. Its products protect over 35,000 customers around the world, including Adaptec, Caltrans, CBS, Georgia Institute of Technology, IBM, NASA, Pizza Hut, Union Pacific Railroad Company, and the U.S. Treasury Department. The Barracuda Spam Firewall and Barracuda Spam Firewall - Outbound protect organizations against spam, viruses, and violations to e-mail security policy. The Barracuda Web Filter, formerly known as the Barracuda Spyware Firewall, offers comprehensive content filtering and complete network protection against spyware, malware and viruses. The Barracuda IM Firewall is the only all in one gateway solution for IM traffic management and security. Barracuda Networks is a privately held company with headquarters in Mountain View, California. Barracuda Networks has offices in eight international locations and distributors in over 43 countries. More information is available at www.barracuda.com.