Porn spammers sneak images into Outlook

Spammers have found a way to bypass Outlook 2003's anti-spam security by embedding pornographic images into their emails.

Spammers who send pornographic pictures in the hope of enticing the recipient to signing up to an adult Web site have discovered a way to bypass Outlook 2003's security features, which are designed to stop potentially offensive content being automatically displayed in the preview window.

The latest version of Microsoft's Outlook was built with a relatively sophisticated spam filter, but as the product's first birthday approaches, spammers are finding new ways to ensure that their unsolicited message go undetected.

However, John Cheney, chief executive of email-security firm BlackSpider Technologies, explained that one of the growing trends is for spammers to attach a pornographic image file to their emails and then use HTML code to display the attached image. This means that Outlook doesn't need to access the Internet before displaying the picture.

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