Re: Image spam hits a new level...

[Nick FitzGerald <nick () virus-l demon co uk>]

Dennis Henderson wrote:

> Can still read it... well enough to score...  HEHE
>
> Hopefully the grass roots OCR initiative will drive this into the ground. I
> also notice commercial vendors announcing OCR capabilities in the "next
> release"..

Anti-OCR is only (??) incidental to it's main (??) purpose.

Most anti-spam efforts do not (and will not anytime soon or ever) have 
OCR-like technologies, so the bad-guys have other phish to phry here.

Think about the CPU resources OCR must use and think about who (if 
anyone -- get it?) can afford that for their huge Email volumes (and by-
and-large those with the worst volumes are probably also those that 
disproportionately get non-spam image(-only) Email, making the CPU 
requirements of OCR even more outrageous).

The more I think about this the more I'm convinced that the spammers 
are targetting something other than beating the odd site that has 
deployed SpamAssassin's OCR plugin or the occasional rough equivalent.


Regards,

Nick FitzGerald

_______________________________________________
Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts.
https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec
Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.