The latest techniques, methods and products for filtering out spam.
"Computer Associates Latest News about Computer Associates has agreed to acquire Qurb for an undisclosed cash sum. The software company already used Qurb's technology for its consumer antispam software. CA plans to rebrand Qurb's software and make it part its eTrust Threat Management suite as well as sell it as eTrust Anti-Spam." Source: newsfactor.com
"Indialinks one the India's largest web hosting provider & official .IN Accredited Registrar, today announced the launch of a new service called SpamGaurd. Spamguard is a cost effective, reliable and time saving solution to increase the corporate productivity. It makes your inbox Virus and Spam free. With its advanced features like Challenge Response, DNSBL/RBL based filtering, White/Black Listing, Custom Filters, Mail tracks, Mail trends, Web based Control Panel and many more, Spamgaurd gives you the directive to monitor, filter emails and avoid spam." Source: i-newswire.com
"The Anticipated Sender standard from anti-spam software provider, SpamButcher will provide an automated way to exempt validated senders from being blocked by spam filters. This can help ensure wanted email messages such as sales receipts and newsletters are delivered." Source: emediawire.com
"Mail-Filters.com, Inc., the global leader in OEM anti-spam solutions, provides technology for its OEM partners that filters billions of messages a day in more than 100 countries and 30 languages. Where most anti-spam technologies have focused on achieving higher catch-rates with apparent disregard for false-positive rates, Mail-Filters has achieved industry leading catch-rate with nearly no false-positives. Mail-Filters' technology is consistently praised by both the industry and its users for its low false positive rates as well as its ability to stop spam and phishing messages." Source: tmcnet.com
"One of Russia’s most notorious spammers, Vardan Kushnir, was found dead in his apartment. The spammer, Vardan Kushnir, may have had connections to the Russian Mob, whether good or bad, it is a good possbility that they were the murderers." Source: betadot.com
"Tangent, Inc., a leading developer of security solutions for education and government, had its spam filtering and network migration products recognized as "cream-of-the-crop" for the education market in Media & Methods magazine's 2005 Awards Portfolio competition. The awards represent the highest level of excellence in the field of education. Tangent's products competed with hundreds of products evaluated by a team of educators who served as judges." Source: ebcvg.com
"Responding to complaints from the Draegers and other subscribers, Midcontinent this week launched what it says is one of the most effective spam blockers on the market. The combination of hardware and software provided by Ironport Systems allows e-mail to be screened four different ways before reaching Midcontinent's servers, meaning that the customer's downloading speed is not affected by the filtering process." Source: argusleader.com
"Don't think about blocking spam - imagine instead that you are playing a game against the spammers, with cash at stake. That's how businesses and internet service providers (ISPs) can improve their email filters, according to a new model of online confrontations. Now Ion Androutsopoulos, Evangelos Magirou and Dimitrios Vassilakis at Athens University of Economics and Business in Greece say the way to find the perfect balance is to model the interaction between spammers and email users as a game between two players. This model allows them to calculate the cost to email users of a particular filter." Source: newscientist.com
"SonicWall, a provider of integrated network security and productivity solutions, and a global leader in Unified Threat Management (UTM) security appliances, recently announced a new range of SSL-VPN solutions to make network access affordable to small and medium enterprises. Kuhn feels that Unified Threat Management is the drift in the firewall appliance security market today. "With the hardware that powers today's enterprise firewalls becoming more robust, it becomes essential to add appliances to it. This is where Unified Threat Management comes into the picture. Rather than administering multiple systems that handle anti virus, content filtering, intrusion detection, and spam filtering, enterprises are adopting UTM firewall appliance that integrates all of the above into a single rack mountable network appliance," he said." Source: cxotoday.com
"Microsoft today announced its intention to acquire FrontBridge Technologies Inc., a privately held, leading provider of secure managed messaging services based in Los Angeles. FrontBridge advanced e-mail filtering technologies offer spam filtering, virus scanning, disaster recovery, policy enforcement and message-archiving solutions to companies who are looking for a managed e-mail security service. The move allows Microsoft to provide a comprehensive suite of managed services for customers to help ensure the security, compliance and availability of all electronic messages." Source: internetadsales.com
"Google's Gmail offers 2GB of storage with spam filtering but no virus scanning or .au addresses. It has downloadable software to notify you when mail arrives, but doesn't have instant-messaging software or features such as online calendars and to-do lists. Google focuses heavily on searches, with desktop search and a browser toolbar and a news search site. Google is also integrated with the online discussion groups. Its maps and local search features are yet to cover Australia." Source: theage.com.au
"Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content management solutions that protect against viruses, Trojans, spyware, hacker attacks and spam, and the Russian company Ashmanov & Partners, announce the acquisition by Kaspersky Lab of Spamtest, a leading Russian anti-spam project, which was developed by Ashmanov & Partners. This agreement launches a procedure for the comprehensive integration of the Spamtest Project into the technological, commercial, and organizational structures of Kaspersky Lab. Complete handover will take about two months and will be completed in the autumn of this year." Source: russianewswire.com
"After getting hit hard by the Nimda worm in 2001, the Virginia Hospital Centre in Arlington is protected by five layers of antivirus and antispam defences: an email relay and antivirus product called eSafe from Aladdin Knowledge Systems; an antispam and antivirus device from MailFrontier; Symantec antivirus software on the email servers and desktops; and a Web filter from Websense to monitor HTTP traffic and prevent employees from accidentally downloading viruses from the Web." Source: techworld.com
"Bains Software announced Monday the release of SpamSweep, a new spam filter for Mac OS X. The software is an advanced bayesian spam filter offering a number of filtering technologies, including domain and relay blacklists, sender whitelisting, and a bayesian filter to automatically delete spam messages before being downloaded by an e-mail client, such as Apple Mail." Source: macobserver.com
While distributed DoS drew much attention, SRUTI presenters also focused on spam, which accounts for the vast majority of email crossing the Internet. The divided senders and recipients into groups based on who routinely receives legitimate email from whom. The memberships of these groups - essentially contact lists - are more stable than criteria used for other screening methods such as looking for keywords. Spammers can change the words selected for spam to duck keyword filters, but establishing themselves as members of trusted groups is more difficult. The algorithm weighs the probability that any message sent from a certain group of senders to a specific group of recipients is spam. It is effective at sorting a certain percentage as definitely spam and definitely not spam, with a grey area in between. The researchers are working to tweak the algorithm to reduce the size of the grey area." Source: techworld.com
"E-mail marketing solutions provider Lyris reports that filtering of permission-based e-mail among ISPs has improved. Said Lyris VP of Deliverability Robb Wilson in a company statement: “ISPs appear to be getting better at distinguishing legitimate e-mail marketing messages from spam.” According to Wilson, average rates of inaccurate filtering for Q2 were around one percent this quarter, a noticeable and notable improvement from the first part of last year." Source: tmcnet.com
"FrontBridge Technologies Inc., a leading provider of secure managed messaging services, reported that in June 90 per cent of traffic on its network was blocked as spam before these messages could consume valuable customer server space, network bandwidth and employee time. Despite the continued prevalence of spam, FrontBridge did report dramatic decreases in the amount of virus-laden email bounced from its network. 36 million messages were rejected or quarantined for carrying viruses, as compared to the 319 million messages in May. The decrease in viruses can be attributed to no coordinated attack last month such as that brought on by the Sober.S worm." Source: net-security.org
"In a bid to tackle forged emails, Cisco Systems, Yahoo and others have submitted an anti-spam standard to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) specification adds an encrypted digital signature to every email message, allowing recipients to verify the sender's identity. A mismatch between the sender and the signature is likely to be the result of a spam or phishing email and can easily be picked up by a filter. A correct certificate should increase the recipient's confidence in the sender's authenticity." Source: vnunet.com
"With so many types of malware stalking the Internet, companies pile on their e-mail defenses. How can a company shore up its servers and desktops against this rising tide of malware? First, say experts, educate employees on spam and viruses. But education can go only so far; technology is also needed. Read more for five steps for defending against malware." Source: computerworld.com
"AGAVA Software announced the availability of AGAVA AntispamServant, a trainable spam filter featuring message content analysis." Source: d-silence.com
"Some of the best Internet minds in the world met last week to discuss a wide range of methods to rid the Web of malicious traffic. The Usenix invitation-only workshop, called Steps to Reducing Unwanted Traffic on the Internet (SRUTI), brought together more than 50 academics from all over the world as well as technical staff from equipment vendors and ISPs to develop methods to cut down on spam, viruses, worms and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks - methods that are practical at an operational level." Source: arnnet.com
"Almost as quickly as spam has spread through the Internet, so have the problems caused by anti-spam technologies. The newest growing concern is the rejection of legitimate emails. NuXo Technologies Inc., however, has developed a solution for this issue. Today they announced the worldwide availability of their innovative Managed Email Filtering Services. This multilayered filtering solution not only provides highly effective protection against spam and virus, but it also guarantees by design that no legitimate emails will be lost." Source: NuXo via eMediaWire
"When I switched to Novell Evolution, finding an anti-spam solution became a top priority. Having warmed to Evolution after noticing that its interface was no longer an imitation of Microsoft Outlook, I quickly learned to appreciate its centralized mail and business tools. Spoiled by Mozilla Thunderbird's built-in spam detection, I wanted some equivalent in Evolution." Source: software.newforge.com
"Endian Firewall is a commercially supported security Linux distribution for turning any box into a full scale security appliance. It features application-level security, a stateful packet inspection firewall, virus, spam, and web traffic filtering as well as a VPN." Source: osdir.com
"SpamBlocks is pleased to declare free accounts for spam protection. SpamBlocks is based on spam filters that prevent junk or unsolicited e-mails from entering your Inbox." Source:free-press-release.com
"What is the largest headache caused by spam? Many sites find that once you get decent filtering in place and start identifying spam, a new problem that crops up is just a disconcerting: Deciding what to do with it." Source: enterpriseitplanet.com
"Postini, the industry's leading provider of email security and management, today announced that it has been positioned in the Leader Quadrant in Gartner's Email Security Boundary1H05 Magic Quadrant (1). The report evaluated vendors in both the ability to execute and vision categories." Source: Postini via Yahoo
"AGAVA Software Company announces the availability of AGAVA AntispamServant. It is a trainable spam filter featuring message content analysis. Apart from solving a number of problems common for all antispam programs, the spam filter AGAVA AntispamServant also presents new capabilities of spam protection. It is extremely easy to use, is characterized by high-speed and efficient operation, works with all e-mail clients, and does not require them to be specially adjusted. AGAVA AntispamServant supports POP3, IMAP, SMTP and automatically identifies and supports SSL-connections." Source: i-newswire.com
"Microsoft recently announced it will more heavily utilize its Sender ID technology when filtering email sent to its Hotmail service. Anti-spam expert and http://www.spambutcher.com founder, Rich Olson is skeptical how much this will do to combat spam. "The biggest misunderstanding about Sender ID is that it's a general anti-spam solution,” Olson said. “It's not, and Microsoft doesn't claim that it is. Its main purpose is to certify that an email message actually came from the claimed sender."" Source: eMediaWire.com
"The Astaro Corporation today announced that Astaro Security Gateway 220 was named Editors' Choice in a roundup of security appliances by PC Magazine. The appliance provides all-in-one protection from viruses, hackers, spam and other threats to computer networks." Source: The Astaro Corporation via Yahoo
"Most of the leading anti-spam solutions on the market offer a multi-layered approach to email filtering. These range from the simple - such as keyword filters and databases of blacklisted IP addresses - to the more complex - such as rules-based scoring, Bayesian analysis and other methods based on mathematical algorithms. Most anti-spam solutions do a reasonable job at keeping spam out. The real question is two-fold: First, does the customer want a solution that can be managed in-house or do they want to use a third-party or outsource service for spam filtering? And second, how much are they willing to pay to eradicate the nuisance of spam?" Source: SCMagazine.com
"Open-source spam filter ASSP has been upgraded with a much improved administration interface, Sender Policy Framework (SPF) support, SMTP session limits, IP connection limits and a much better statistics page for reporting on mail traffic. ASSP is a Perl program, so the same software runs on Linux, Unix, Windows, OS X and most other systems for which a Perl interpreter is available. The most noticeable addition is the SPF support. The SPF protocol is designed to prevent messages with incorrect return-addresses from being delivered. Because most spam currently has a forged return address, this approach might rapidly become an effective anti-spam measure." Source: ITWeek.com