Announcing Cloudmark Anti-Fraud: the first fraud prevention service available for free today
SpamNet stopped more than 1 million fraudulent PayPal messages for its community since July 2003
SAN FRANCISCO — March 4, 2004 — Cloudmark™ Inc., the company that stops spam before it costs you money, today announced Cloudmark Anti-Fraud, the first free fraud prevention service for email users available today. The only real-time SpamFighting community in the world, now with more than 850,000 users, SpamNet works like a "neighborhood watch" program. SpamNet is based solely on the real-time feedback from its users, who collectively declare what kind of email they want and don't want in their community. This model has protected the SpamNet community from all email threats – viruses, worms, spam and even the most devious fraud messages – since the product was launched. In fact, Cloudmark has blocked more than 1 million fraudulent PayPal® messages alone since July 2003. A long-standing feature within SpamNet, fraud prevention is now available for free to email users everywhere at http://www.cloudmark.com/products/spamnet.
While many providers claim fraud protection, but merely alert users to the existence of fraudulent messages after they have circulated and potentially done harm, or simply block fraudulent messages too late, Cloudmark actually prevents the messages from reaching users' inboxes in the first place. To expand on its Cloudmark Rating program announced in September 2003, Cloudmark is also reestablishing trust between companies and their customers, enlivening e-commerce that has eroded in the face of skyrocketing quantities of fraud messages.
"Fraud is an ongoing problem for consumers, corporations, and even government agencies," said Don Blumenthal of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). "We need a combination of technologies that prevents the fraud from entering consumers' inboxes, aggressive enforcement, consumer education, and people who are ready to tackle the problems in all possible ways."
"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," said Karl Jacob, CEO for Cloudmark. "Cloudmark plans to leave the job of publishing fraud statistics and issuing alerts about potential fraudulent emails to other providers, and focus on protecting users from threats preemptively as it has done for years with its real-time community."
The protection SpamNet users enjoy comes courtesy of the product's real-time, "people protecting people" approach. Attacking spam and fraudulent messages demands a constant focus on the hunted not the hunters. A user base of nearly 1 million people who constantly shop online, bank online, order catalogues, sign up for newsletters and participate in chat rooms is more than just a community – it's a powerful and very intelligent weapon. That weapon was the reason not a single SpamNet user was infected by Sobig.f, 2003's worst virus which harmed millions. It is also the reason that SpamNet users across the world are protected from the PayPal email scams which have rapidly changed flavor and aggressiveness since last summer. SpamNet's real-time peer-to-peer (P2P) technology is the only way to truly stay ahead of spammers and sources of fraud or malicious attacks, because the second those messages are blocked by the first few trusted users, the entire community is safe.
A second facet of Cloudmark Anti-Fraud is its link to the company's September 2003 announcement of the Cloudmark Rating program, which works to reestablish trust between companies and customers. Cloudmark Rating solves the false-positive problem by ensuring legitimate businesses get their newsletters and email updates delivered to customers' and partners' inboxes without being caught by spam filters. The anti-fraud platform is an extension on Cloudmark Rating because it automatically blocks fraudulent messages, but also focuses on leaving legitimate email alone – an aspect of the problem often overlooked by other providers' anti-fraud functionality. Cloudmark Rating, which requires businesses to register their newsletters and other emails before mass-mailing them to customers, is a breakthrough email reputation system that fingerprints those messages sent by legitimate businesses and matches them at the end-user level, correctly allowing them through every time. Cloudmark Rating and Anti-Fraud work together to rebuild trust between companies and consumers, ensuring that the email from PayPal waiting for you in your inbox was positively sent by PayPal, Inc. Businesses and email marketers can register for Cloudmark Rating at http://rating.cloudmark.com.
About SpamNet
SpamNet is the first and largest SpamFighting community in the world – more than 850,000 people collaborating in real-time to stop spam. A well-oiled machine that stays ahead of spammer tactics that change by the minute, SpamNet processes 200 million emails per day and adds more than 2,000 new users per day. Available for both Outlook® and Outlook Express®, SpamNet keeps over 95 percent of spam out of your inbox automatically, while also protecting its users from fraud messages and email-borne virus and worm outbreaks.
As a SpamNet user, if a spam does slip through to your inbox, simply click the Block button to remove the message from your inbox and notify the entire SpamNet community immediately. This automatically helps stop that spam message from being sent to other members of the SpamNet community. Similarly, if you think a certain message is not spam, you can click the Unblock button and share that intelligence with the network. To ensure accuracy and the lowest false positives, SpamNet uses its Truth Evaluation System (TeS) to establish trust and reputation for each user in the network. This trust rating is considered alongside every message submitted by SpamNet members, eliminating flawed submissions and gaming of the system.
In addition, SpamNet installs in just minutes, is extremely user friendly, and is simple to use because it doesn't require constant tweaking, rule configuration or whitelist and blacklist updating. SpamNet is also the only product in PC Magazine's February "antispam filters" review to receive the full five stars for accuracy, delivering best performance two years in a row.
Pricing and Availability
New users can download SpamNet for Outlook or Outlook Express and get free anti-spam and anti-fraud service for 30 days at www.cloudmark.com/spamnet . After the trial, the regular price is $3.99 per month, or you can lock in 12 months for the price of ten months for just $39.95 per year. If a user decides not to purchase SpamNet after the free trial, he or she will be left with anti-fraud only, and SpamNet will filter all fraudulent messages to the user's Spam folder as it did for spam and fraud during the trial.
Outlook and Outlook Express are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corp. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
About Cloudmark
Cloudmark protects 2 billion global subscribers daily from an explosion in messaging abuses across more operator networks than anyone else. Only Cloudmark defends the world’s largest Mobile, Fixed and Social Media Providers, including AT&T, Comcast, MySpace, NTT, Swisscom and Time Warner Cable, with scalable and accurate protection against the widest range of existing and emerging messaging threats.