China's Top Web Portal, Sohu.com, Selects Cloudmark Authority to Safeguard E-mail for More Than 8 Million Users
Sohu Rolls Out Cloudmark to Protect Users Against Onslaught of Games-Related Spam
San Francisco and Macau, SAR – GSMA Mobile Asia Congress – November 18, 2008 – Cloudmark, Inc., a global leader in carrier-grade messaging security, today announced that Cloudmark Authority® has been selected by China's No. 1 Web portal, Sohu.com, as the company's primary anti-spam solution for their e-mail services. Sohu selected Cloudmark Authority due to its high accuracy, ease of use, manageability, and ability to scale to meet the needs of Sohu's large user base. In trials, Cloudmark Authority was proven to successfully block 98 percent of inbound spam, phishing and virus attacks with near zero false positives.
Sohu is the top ranking e-mail service provider in China. With a large user base, Sohu has inevitably become a target for spammers. Prior to implementing Cloudmark Authority, Sohu was challenged by large volumes of unwanted messages, including new waves of foreign language (mostly English) spam, clogging its messaging system. This caused strains on its infrastructure as well as growing operational costs. Further, the high number of customer support calls and customer churn due to users' dissatisfaction with the old anti-spam solution created headaches for Sohu. Finally, Sohu experienced spam issues resulting from computers in its network that were compromised by hackers and used, unknowingly, to send spam messages from Sohu domains. This abuse led other e-mail service providers to blacklist some Sohu IP addresses and prevent delivery of messages sent by Sohu subscribers.
All of these challenges became especially critical during the Olympic Games in Beijing. It was well known that spammers and hackers would likely use the Olympics as a prime opportunity to attack enterprise and personal mailboxes and that users in China would face unusually high volumes of Game-related spam messages. As the official sponsor of Internet Content Service for the Beijing Olympic Games, Soho knew that tens of millions of its e-mail subscribers could be victims of spam outbreaks during the Olympics.
Following an extensive testing phase, Sohu selected Cloudmark Authority and deployed the solution prior to the start of the Olympic Games. Cloudmark's technological advantages over other message filtering solutions were key factors in Sohu's decision. Cloudmark combines highly sophisticated Advanced Message Fingerprinting™ technology based on innovative, high performance algorithms and a Global Threat Network consisting of trusted reporters in 190 countries to provide security intelligence and filtering at all points in the messaging infrastructure. Cloudmark's Advanced Messaging Fingerprinting technology enables extremely efficient scanning, utilizing only a fraction of the CPU of tradition rules and heuristics-based solution.
In addition, Cloudmark stops messaging threats in any language, protocol or format (including image spam, .pdf spam, virus executables, attachments, etc.). Cloudmark's language-agnostic threat analysis meant that it was able to keep the inboxes of Sohu users clean from both Chinese and non-Chinese language spam. Users are also instantly protected from the latest attack as Cloudmark Authority is automatically updated every 30-60 seconds with new threat data.
"Since implementing Cloudmark, Sohu has experienced immediate and significant resource savings in the areas of CPU, storage, Internet network resources, administrative and customer support," said Qiu Yingbo of Sohu. "Our decision to deploy Cloudmark has resulted in a significant improvement in subscriber satisfaction and enhancement of our company brand. We are extremely pleased with the results and look forward to working with Cloudmark to continue delivering the best e-mail experience for our customers."
"With the opening of our offices in Beijing and Hong Kong in May of 2007, Cloudmark demonstrated its commitment to providing service providers in China with powerful messaging security solutions and ongoing support against the ever-growing spam problem," said David Somerville, regional vice president of Cloudmark.. "Our partnership with Sohu further solidifies our dedication to this market and marks an important milestone for Cloudmark's growth, development and leadership in China."
- Media Contact for Cloudmark in China:
-
Cloudmark, Inc.
Roland Arlt
Asia Pacific Director of Business Development
rarlt@cloudmark.com -
e21MagicMedia
Maggie Yuan
e21MagicMedia
(8610) 6566-1616 ext. 130
Maggie.yuan@e21mm.com - or
- Helen Han
e21MagicMedia
(8610) 6566-1616 ext. 135
helen.han@e21mm.com
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.