SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Secure Computing Corporation (Nasdaq: SCUR), a leader in enterprise gateway security, today announced it is waging war against image spam, where spammers hide messages in image files to escape detection. Over the past few months, Secure Computing Research has identified a 200-percent increase in the amount of image spam, which today accounts for 30 percent of all spam and approximately one in every four messages circulating on the Internet.

A Real Menace to Corporations

"Image-based spam is a particularly difficult problem for a couple of reasons," noted Michael Osterman, founder and principal of Osterman Research. "It is much harder to detect with conventional spam-filtering and blocking technologies. Further, it is typically much larger than normal text-based spam, consuming much more bandwidth and storage."

"Traditional anti-spam software depends on content filtering techniques such as keyword filtering and Bayesian analysis to detect spam. Even the technology used to recognize characters from images, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), is not effective on today's image spam," said Dr. Paul Judge, chief technology officer of Secure Computing. "Spammers are using advanced mathematical and graphical techniques like random modification of image pixels and dynamic construction of images from multiple components to bypass spam filtering tools."

Secure Computing Corp. (Nasdaq: SCUR)