Image spam dramatically reduced for customers.Companies and Interact service providers now can eliminate most of the annoying, persistent, and system-clogging "image spare" often used to hawk penny stocks Inexpensive issues of stock, typically selling at less than $1 a share, in companies that often are newly formed or involved in highly speculative ventures. Penny stocks are usually available for sale over-the-counter, that is, among brokers and customers themselves, as , pills and remedies. Modus 4.35, the latest version of Vircom Inc. 's email assurance solution, provides new filtering capabilities that capture 98 percent of image spam--junk email primarily composed of pictures --before it reaches user email inboxes. Image span, an increasingly common and sophisticated network nuisance, is difficult to catch because email filters cannot "read" messages embedded in an image. Spammers, therefore, easily bypass filters by sending a unique, slightly different image each time. Lately, spammers combine this technique, known as image serializing, with the use of millions of spare zombies Zombies Companies that continue to operate even though they are insolvent. Also known as living dead. Notes: It's advisable to avoid investing in zombies at all costs their life expectancies are highly unpredictable. or "bots bots maggots of flies which infest animals, especially horses and sheep. The term bot is also loosely used to include the invasive maggots such as those of Cuterebra and Wohlfahrtia spp. horse bots see gasterophilus. "--infected desktop PCs, located all over the world, that spammers secretly commandeer com·man·deer tr.v. com·man·deered, com·man·deer·ing, com·man·deers 1. To force into military service. 2. To seize for military use; confiscate. 3. To take arbitrarily or by force. to relay their emails. Using these three methods, image spammers confound most anti-span technologies on the market today. With the problem expected to get worse, Vircom's researchers and software developers have created new anti-spam technology that will allow Modus users to block most image span immediately. Customers See Drop in Image Spam An e-mail advertisement in the form of an image in the message rather than text in order to avoid detection as spam. Spam filters typically analyze words in a message, which is relatively fast, but scanning images with optical character recognition (OCR) to extract the text is slow. Vircom customers like WebToolset in Atlanta, and Blue Ridge Blue Ridge, eastern range of the Appalachian Mts., extending south from S Pa. to N Ga.; highest mountains in the E United States. Mt. Mitchell, 6,684 ft (2,037 m) high, is the tallest peak. Beginning with a narrow ridge in the north, c. Internetworks of Charlottesville, Va., are testing Modus 4.35 in their networks right now. "Since we began testing a couple weeks ago, our clients aren't calling about image spam," said Jeff Wood For the Wisconsin politician, see . Jeff Wood (born January 20, 1957) is an American former race car driver born in Wichita, Kansas. He drove in the CanAm series for Carl Haas in 1981 and 1982, then made his CART debut in 1983 at the Las Vegas Grand Prix. , chief executive officer of WebTooset, an enterprise application development and IT training company that also hosts email servers. "What I've seen since we switched is that it's almost all gone away." The story from Blue Ridge Internetworks--a network consulting and services company whose biggest clients typically have 100-150 email boxes.-is similar. "Earlier Modus versions blocked a fair amount of image spam, while most other anti-spam products were easily defeated. But, being better than the competition wasn't enough," said Vircom "That's why Modus now identifies and traps nearly all image-based span, while allowing legitimate images to get through to user mailboxes." www.vircom.com |
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