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Spam Blocker E-mail security vendor IronPort Systems is
administering its spam-catching service to help users stop viruses
before they penetrate their corporate networks.
The company announced this week its Virus Outbreak Filters, which will
be integrated into IronPort's Messaging Gateway appliances to monitor
incoming and outgoing e-mail traffic for messages that may contain
viruses. IronPort is using its SenderBase database, which can monitor
roughly 20 million IP addresses for spammer activity to also look for
messages that might contain viruses.
"If we see ...a number of IP addresses that have never sent mail before
suddenly all sending with the same characteristics, say an encrypted
password, we would elevate the threat level and generate an alert to
administrators while automatically starting to quarantine traffic," says
Tom Gillis, IronPort's vice president of marketing.
IronPort's gateway appliance will quarantine suspicious messages until
they can be deemed not harmful or run through anti-virus software with
updated signatures and scrubbed of any malicious code.
The idea for IronPort's new filters came in part from IT service
provider Electronic Data Systems (EDS), one of IronPort's largest
customers. Because it can take from two to eight hours to clean up a
desktop PC after a virus outbreak, EDS decided to start blocking
messages at the gateway whenever it heard of a new virus or found one
inside an organization, says Richard Parvin, senior engineer at EDS. The
company would block all incoming messages with attached EXE files, but
it had nowhere to store those messages while it waited for anti-virus
vendors to create signatures for the new virus, so the messages were
deleted.
With IronPort's Virus Outbreak Filters, Messaging Gateway appliances do
this detection automatically and queue the suspicious mail until a
signature for the new virus is in hand. "When a new virus is out there,
we want to be able to stop it at the mail gateway," Parvin says.
"IronPort took our idea that was kind of manual and clumsy and
integrated it into their software so that we can have very early
detection."
Another advantage of IronPort's approach is that the appliance stores
the suspicious mail locally until done queuing, instead of passing it to
another server.
While quarantining incoming e-mail messages when a virus is suspected
might seem extreme, it's also a rather benign one because administrators
can decide when to release messages onto their networks, Gillis says.
Given the cost of cleaning up after a virus, IronPort says companies
will welcome this additional layer of virus protection.
The filters can pass along suspicious mail to any anti-virus software
for scanning, Gillis says. IronPort offers the Sophos' anti-virus
product with its appliance. Included with the filters will be tools for
administrators to customize them, such as creating exceptions to the
quarantine rules.
IronPort's Messaging Gateway competes with e-mail security gateways from
companies such as BorderWare, Mirapoint and CipherTrust. The company
says it is the first anti-spam vendor to apply its spam-detection
technology and methods to viruses.
For the latest information about
spam
The Goals of spam
The goal of spam
is to determine the intrinsic grouping in a set of unlabeled data. But
how to decide what constitutes a good spam? It can be shown that
there is no absolute “best” criterion which would be independent of the
final aim of the spam. Consequently, it is the user which must
supply this criterion, in such a way that the result of the spam
will suit their needs.
For instance, we could be interested in finding representatives for
homogeneous groups (data reduction), in finding “natural
clusters” and describe their unknown properties (“natural” data
types), in finding useful and suitable groupings (“useful” data
classes) or in finding unusual data objects (outlier detection).
For the latest information about
The Goals of spam
Who uses spam?
Many different types of organizations use
spam as a vital
part of the work. A sampling of these include:
-
Marketing:
finding groups of customers with similar behavior given a large
database of customer data containing their properties and past
buying records;
-
Biology:
classification of plants and animals given their features;
-
Libraries:
book ordering;
-
Insurance:
identifying groups of motor insurance policy holders with a high
average claim cost; identifying frauds;
-
City-planning:
identifying groups of houses according to their house type,
value and geographical location;
-
Earthquake
studies: spam observed earthquake epicenters to
identify dangerous zones;
-
WWW:
document classification; spam weblog data to discover
groups of similar access patterns.
For the latest information about
Spam Blocker
