In the opinion of MXSweep specialists, stock market pump-and-dump fraudsters have found a new vehicle for their email-borne spam campaigns -> Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. The soon to be worthless stocks are being promoted in file attachments with deceptively innocent sounding names like Invoice270707.xls, Stock-Info-2007.xls, or Requested-Report.xls. While malware writers have in the past used Excel as a Trojan horse to carry viruses, the presence of this kind of spam within Excel files is a relatively new phenomenon.

    As the keynote speaker at an MXSweep Reseller Conference in London today, Danny Jenkins,MXSweep CTO and founder told the audience: "This year the speed at which spam techniques are evolving has really begun to accelerate. This makes it expensive for businesses who struggle to build ever more complex email filtering defences to keep up with this alarming pace of change. MXSweep takes a unique approach to reducing the spiralling cost of fighting spam. The secret is simple, we eliminate the over reliance on single point solutions by adopting a vendor-neutral stance with multiple layers of filtering protection, each from a different vendor, and each as replaceable as the next. Every six to nine months we eliminate one of the under performing filters and replace them with the best new filter available at that time."

    For many years we had grown accustomed to text based spam, a format still in widespread use today, then came a global outbreak of emails carrying image spam based on GIF or JPEG formatted graphic payloads. Not long ago the spammer community had switched to PDF attachment spam, and now for the first time we are seeing more spam campaigns based on Excel based spam. Each evolutionary advance poses a tougher challenge to the anti-spam industry as filter vendors struggle to keep up.

    Image spam was at first impossible to block by traditional first generation email filtering engines. Luckily, with the introduction of machine-vision artificial intelligence filters with optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities, there are now spam filtering engines available that can graphically read image spam and interpret the wording of the disguised spam content in much the same way as the human eye. Even this failed to deter the spammer underworld who tried to break through OCR filters by distorting the images or inserting random imperfections to the pattern that the human eye ignored but which was enough to bypass the OCR technologies used by many spam filter vendors. Believe it or not, when PDF spam emerged recently, some vendors tackled it by blocking every email with a PDF attachment, not taking into account if it contained spam or not, because they had no other solution.

    David Potter, the founding director of FutureNET, said "It has been a tough time for the reseller channel trying to push dedicated email appliances to the SME market knowing that these boxes just cannot cope with unforseen threats in the way a managed service can. It is no coincidence that MXPurifier can already interecept Excel based spam. Their multi-vendor approach combined with in-the-cloud filtering make them the safest player in the email filtering market today. Our resellers have been surprisingly quick to recognise this business opportunity and we expect that over 33% of FutureNET's 2007 sales in the UK market will be driven by MXSweep business alone."

    The subscription based hosted email filtering service available globally from MXSweep's channel partners is MXPurifier. One of the many filter vendors used by the MXPurifier managed email filtering service is Commtouch. Their Recurrent Pattern Detection (RPD) technology, blocks all spam variants automatically, regardless of content, because it uses a knowledge of global distribution patterns not just content alone.

For more information visit http://www.mxsweep.com/email-spam-blocker.html.