Astaro (News - Alert) Corporation, a vendor of security appliances, announced that its security gateway’s e-mail protection effectively blocks newly invented Macromedia Flash spam. The first messages were intercepted on Saturday, July 26.

 

The Flash site files are being hosted on neutral sites to avoid being detected by the traditional anti-spam solution. Traditional solutions try to block the spam by blocking the host site. In this case, as the files are hosted on a neutral sites, these traditional solutions may end up with a high degree of false positives, or misclassified legitimate messages.

 

By using Commtouch Recurrent Pattern Detection (RPD) technology, Astaro easily and effectively blocks this and other types of spam. Since RPD works based on the fundamental nature of spam and malware — its distribution en masse — it is perceived to be content-agnostic.

 

With this new type of spam, the users will be directed to spam which contains hyperlinks to Flash files (ending in .swf), which contain a function called “getURL.” When a user clicks this URL, it redirects the recipient to the spam site. The Flash files themselves are hosted on neutral, third-party image-hosting sites, such as Image Shack, which has hosted the files from the latest outbreak. Although it is only spam right now, it is estimated that it will soon be used to distribute malware.

 

According to Commtouch an email and web defense technology provider, the spam technique had become a major outbreak by Monday, July 28. Astaro mail security is available in all Astaro Security Gateways and will also be available as a stand alone product in the new Astaro Mail Gateway (News - Alert), due out this September.

 

“Astaro has always focused on finding customers the best and most up-to-date tools available to protect them from the latest threats,” Astaro CEO Jan Hichert explained. “It’s instances like this spam outbreak that really prove the value of our efforts. By relying on RPD technology, we know that our customers are protected from today’s spam outbreaks, and also defended against whatever new tactics will arise tomorrow.”