Image spam

Fig. 1. Example of a clean spam image
Fig. 2. Examples of obfuscated spam images to evade OCR-based and signature-based detection
Fig. 3. Average size of spam versus percentage of image spam[1]
Fig. 4. Average size of spam versus percentage of image and ZIP/RAR spam (2011-2012, per week)[2]

Image-based spam,[3][4] or image spam, is a kind of email spam where the textual spam message is embedded into images, that are then attached to spam emails.[5] Since most of the email clients will display the image file directly to the user, the spam message is conveyed as soon as the email is opened (there is no need to further open the attached image file).

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference Report 1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference Report 2 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Giorgio Fumera, Ignazio Pillai, Fabio Roli,"Spam filtering based on the analysis of text information embedded into images". Journal of Machine Learning Research (special issue on Machine Learning in Computer Security), vol. 7, pp. 2699-2720, 12/2006.
  4. ^ Battista Biggio, Giorgio Fumera, Ignazio Pillai, Fabio Roli,Biggio, Battista; Fumera, Giorgio; Pillai, Ignazio; Roli, Fabio (2011). "A survey and experimental evaluation of image spam filtering techniques, Pattern Recognition Letters". Pattern Recognition Letters. 32 (10): 1436–1446. doi:10.1016/j.patrec.2011.03.022. Volume 32, Issue 10, 15 July 2011, Pages 1436-1446, ISSN 0167-8655.
  5. ^ Li, Siyuan; Li, Ruiguang; Xu, Yuan; Zhou, Hao; Yan, Hanbing; Xu, Bin; Zhang, Honggang (2018-09-01). "WAF‐Based Chinese Character Recognition for Spam Image Filtering". Chinese Journal of Electronics. 27 (5): 1050–1055. doi:10.1049/cje.2018.06.014. ISSN 1022-4653.