Picture This: A Sneakier Kind Of Spam

A new strain of spam popping up in e-mail boxes is confounding consumers and corporate security officials. The spam contains images spouting everything from stock scams to Viagra, and its volume has more than doubled since April, according to analysis by anti-spam vendor IronPort Systems. Image-based spam accounts for 21% of all spam, compared with just 1% in late 2005, IronPort says. Marketers are deploying image-based spam because it is harder to detect than text-based spam, and consumers are more likely to read an e-mail with a picture or graphic, says Craig Sprosts of IronPort.