Porn spammers sneak images into Outlook
Spammers who send pornographic pictures in the hope of enticing the recipient to signing up to an adult Web site have discovered a way to bypass Outlook 2003's security features, which are designed to stop potentially offensive content being automatically displayed in the preview window.
The latest version of Microsoft's Outlook was built with a relatively sophisticated spam filter, but as the product's first birthday approaches, spammers are finding new ways to ensure that their unsolicited message go undetected.
In order to help fight spam, Microsoft armed Outlook 2003 with a Bayesian filter, which tries to recognise unsolicited messages by examining the words used and, depending on the frequency of certain key words, calculating the probability of that e-mail being spam.
The company also improved on previous versions of Outlook by allowing users to choose if an HTML email should be allowed to access the Internet and download content. This gives the user a chance to prevent the pornography from ever reaching his or her PC.
However, John Cheney, chief executive of email-security firm BlackSpider Technologies, explained that one of the growing trends is for spammers to attach a pornographic image file to their emails and then use HTML code to display the attached image. This means that Outlook doesn't need to access the Internet before displaying the picture.
