Commtouch, an information security company based in Israel, announced yesterday the release of its Q3 Email Threats Trends Report and the report’s emphasis on the latest threat of spammers hiding their reputations. According to Amir Lev, CTO of Commtouch,

“The growing trend is for spammers to adopt the good reputation built up by other sites and senders in order to bypass reputation-based email filters. They accomplish this in a number of ways, including stealing legitimate email senders’ credentials, or compromising email account enrollment processes and automatically registering thousands of free email accounts.”

Other highlights of the report include:

- “Spam levels throughout the third quarter averaged 77%, as in the previous quarter, ranging from a low of 61% to a peak of 94% of all email

- Over half of zombies/bots change their IP address daily

- Malware masqueraded as legitimate newsletters such as CNN Daily Top 10 or IE7 Browser updates

- New spam tactics during the quarter included: links to Flash (.swf) files, ASCII art spam, and hidden Bayesian poisoning text combined with HTML tricks.”

Commtouch’s main product is its Zero-Hour software based on the company’s Recurrent Pattern Detection (RPD) technology that searches for recurring patterns and indicates spam that way. Other Israeli security companies besides Commtouch include, Check Point, PineApp, Sentrigo and Aladdin, among many others.

Commtouch was featured in depth on Israel Innovation 2.0 in October 2007 and has increasingly become a significant Israeli company to watch in IT.

About the author: Lisa Damast currently resides in Israel. Any questions or inquiries regarding this blog can be directed to her via email at lisa (at) israelinnovation20 (dot) com. She can also be followed on Twitter, where she covers additional Israeli technology companies and headlines among other topics.