TMCnet News
Barracuda Networks Launches New Image Spam Defense Technologies TMCnet Contributing Editor Barracuda Networks Inc. has launched its third generation  of image spam defense enhancements to the Barracuda Spam Firewall. Providing even greater protection against the evolving complexity of image spam this release renders these new forms of spam ineffective.Diving deeper into image spam messages, the new email security techniques automate spam fingerprint analysis. These capabilities further the effectiveness of image spam filtering that protects more than 40,000 Barracuda Networks customers worldwide. “While much of the attention last year was on the growth in volume of image spam, we are noticing an increase in the sophistication of image spam techniques,” said Stephen Pao, vice president of product management for Barracuda Networks in a press release. He continued: “Since last July when we originally announced both our image spam fingerprinting and optical character recognition (OCR) defenses, we have continued to enhance our defense layers to stay ahead of the latest trends.” Typically, image spam embeds text inside of images with the intent of hiding content from the text rules processing layers of spam filters. Since July 2006, Barracuda Spam Firewall has been shipping an optical character recognition (OCR) engine to combat these forms of image spam.Senders of image spam attempted to use animated GIF files to spread content across multiple frames in early attempts to foil OCR engines. They also tried to obfuscate text inside their images by corrupting the images with lines, speckles and other image artifacts. Barracuda Networks second-generation OCR engines incorporated both animated GIF analysis and fuzzy logic to stifle text obfuscation techniques to neutralize these techniques. Barracuda Networks has incorporated a new multi-pass OCR engine with the third generation of image spam defense. Deeper analysis is performed by this new multi-pass engine by performing image pre-processing operations to normalize the images prior to final optical character recognition passes. The pre-processing operations are very effective against attempts to hide text by varying color and contrast combinations of text and backgrounds. Barracuda Networks claims to maintain a 95 percent accuracy rate in identifying and blocking image spam with these new techniques. Additionally, Barracuda Networks has significantly enhanced the image spam defense capabilities in its backend systems at Barracuda Central. This is an advanced technology operations center where engineers continually monitor the Internet for trends in spam and virus attacks, and develop strategies to mitigate those threats. Image spam samples are collected by Barracuda Central from its honeypot systems and from more than 40,000 customer systems across the globe. Barracuda Central then processes the identified spam images through the multi-pass OCR engine, generates fingerprints for these images and packages them for automatic delivery to Barracuda Spam Firewalls through hourly Energize Updates. The Barracuda Spam Firewall can efficiently and intelligently block image spam analyzed at Barracuda Central by comparing fingerprints of images in subsequent emails against a database of known spam images. A combination of the image processing power at Barracuda Central and the efficient handling of fingerprints in the Fingerprint Analysis layer of the Barracuda Spam Firewall benefit the customers with latest image processing techniques while minimizing the processing requirements on their Barracuda Spam Firewalls. Barracuda Networks is the provider of application security appliances for comprehensive email, Internet and IM protection. Don’t forget to check out TMCnet’s White Paper Library, which provides a selection of in-depth information on relevant topics affecting the IP Communications industry. The library offers white papers, case studies and other documents which are free to registered users.--------- Anuradha Shukla is a contributing editor for TMCnet, covering call centers, CRM and information technology. To see more of her articles, please visit her columnist page. |