BURLINGTON, USA: Astaro Corp., a leading vendor of security appliances, announced that Astaro Security Gateway's email protection blocks newly invented Macromedia Flash spam.

The first messages were intercepted on Saturday, July 26. By Monday, July 28 the spam technique had become a major outbreak, according to Commtouch, a leading email and web defense technology provider.

This new type of spam contains hyperlinks to Flash files (ending in .swf), which contain a function called "getURL" that, when clicked, 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. This technique allows spammers to bypass traditional content-based anti-spam filters, and it is speculated that it will only be a matter of time before similar messages will be used to distribute malware.

As the culprit Flash files are being hosted on neutral sites, any anti-spam solution that attempts to solve the problem by blocking the host site may end up with a high degree of false positives, or misclassified legitimate messages. Astaro, however, easily and effectively blocks this and other types of spam, by using Commtouch Recurrent Pattern DetectionT (RPDT) technology. RPD is content-agnostic, since it works based on the fundamental nature of spam and malware, its distribution en masse.

"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 explains. "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."

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, due out this September.