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*** Spammers Find New Ways To Slip Through ***

San Francisco, CA -- 08/19/2007
Just when it appeared tech firms had the upper hand against spam,
spammers have unleashed new forms of the meddlesome e-mail
to trick filters.

Spam in the form of popular PDF e-mail attachments and electronic
greeting cards is confounding e-mail security systems and annoying
consumers. The recent Storm e-mail virus and several pump-and-
dump stock scams are clogging inboxes and snookering consumers
into downloading malicious software. And it could get worse as the
holidays approach, anti-spam experts say.

The trend illustrates the shifting nature of spam's deceptive packaging.
As anti-spam vendors come up with solutions, new versions pop up.
The most common spam - which uses images to avoid the detection
of spam filters - is quickly fading because of advances in anti-spam
technology.

But spam in PDFs, non-existent in May, now accounts for 8%
of unsolicited commercial e-mail. Last week, a PDF promoting
a pump-and-dump scam contributed to a 30% increase in overall
spam. It was sent from compromised PCs turned into spam-spreading
bots, security firm Sophos says.

Faux electronic-greeting cards, containing links to viruses, have also
picked up. Since mid-July, security firm Postini has blocked about 800
million copies of Storm, an e-mail virus masquerading as a greeting
card. "It's a cat-and-mouse game, and PDFs are the latest twist," says
Adam Swidler, senior marketing manager at Postini.

Spammers also are beginning to use Excel and Zip files.

As spam evolves, from text in the body of e-mail to images embedded
in attachments, it has become more difficult for filters to identify, says
Tom Gillis, co-founder of IronPort Systems, a security firm acquired by
Cisco Systems (CSCO). "There is a social engineering element to this.
People are more likely to open a PDF file or Excel document, which are
more trusted."

Spammers now are also leveraging popular online applications to tout
ads for everything from stock scams to Viagra. Subscribers to Google's
news alerts are beginning to receive links to such ads among their
customary news links.

"Spammers make hay with a technique as long as they can," says
Doug Bowers, Symantec's (SYMC) senior director of engineering.

New strains have largely supplanted image spam, which accounted for
half of all spam in January. Image spam varies the content of individual
messages - through colors, backgrounds, picture sizes or font types -
and was harder to detect than text-based spam. Since software makers
came up with a solution, image spam has dropped to 8% of all spam,
Symantec says.
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