Life is grand

a new form of spam that’s been popping up: image spam. The content of the spammer’s message is contained within an image to get by content filters. In response, spam-filtering companies are starting to use OCRs to detect words in images. And, in response to that response, spammers begin to distort images slightly so that they can’t be read accurately by OCR software.

Another War We’re Not Winning: Us vs Spam from O’Reilly Radar.

That is ironic. Many sites are implementing CAPTCHAs on registration and comment forms to block bots. They distort the image to stop bots with OCR from reading the image.

Tangential to this spammers come along and what do they do? They send us image spam which we try to use OCR to catch to which they reply by distorting the images.

Could our anti-spam systems advance OCR technology and so inadvertently allow bots to get through CAPTCHA?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 at 11:06 pm and is filed under Email, Post, Spam, bots, captcha, ocr, war. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.