Cloudmark Announces Innovative Sender Reputation
Cloudmark Gateway with Unique Multi-Source Sender Reputation Offers Improved Protocol Filtering Accuracy to Effectively Combat Botnets
San Francisco—February 19, 2008 – Cloudmark, Inc., the global leader in carrier-grade messaging security, today announced the availability of Cloudmark Sender Reputation, a new feature of Cloudmark Gateway™ that significantly enhances message filtering accuracy. Cloudmark Gateway is a high-performance edge mail transfer agent (MTA) that integrates with Cloudmark Authority, the company's carrier-grade anti-spam, anti-phishing and anti-virus solution. Cloudmark Sender Reputation authenticates sending IP address legitimacy, helping to determine with high accuracy if e-mails from a given sender should be blocked, throttled or accepted into the service provider's messaging infrastructure. Cloudmark Sender Reputation uniquely leverages a combination of real-time data from Cloudmark's Global Threat Network, traffic pattern analysis, fingerprint correlation and third-party reputation data. These sources work in tandem to accurately determine the reputation of senders by automatically correlating sender behavior patterns with recipient's assessment of the senders' messages as spam or legitimate.
Industry research has shown that 20 percent of the world's computers are part of botnets, complex networks of compromised computers, and that these computers are now the primary source of spam, phishing and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Sender Reputation offers Cloudmark Gateway customers the most advanced solution on the market for identifying messages sent from IP addresses that are part of a botnet. Cloudmark Gateway blocks or rate limits unwanted messages at the protocol level, saving ISPs considerable bandwidth, storage and server resources.
Unlike many other reputation services that rely on infrastructure tests, observed behavior or a single detection method, Cloudmark Sender Reputation is the only reputation-based solution that leverages four distinct sources of data to create a broader and thereby more accurate reputation profile of sender IP addresses; profiles that are also less prone to false positives:
- Cloudmark's Global Threat Network—Cloudmark Sender Reputation uses real-time threat reports from the Cloudmark Global Threat Network consisting of more than 300 million trusted reporting sources to determine sender legitimacy. This data stream not only makes Cloudmark the most timely solution available, it also provides actual recipients' feedback on whether the message they received is spam or not.
- Traffic pattern analysis—an additional feature added to Cloudmark Authority that reports back information about the traffic patterns of a given IP address, helping to better identify spamming IP addresses.
- Fingerprint correlation—leverages data generated by Cloudmark's Advanced Message FingerprintingTM algorithms to correlate messages that, after careful content analysis, are confirmed as spam with the actual IP address from which the messages were sent. Other reputation systems infer this connection through feedback loops or only perform non-content related tests on the IP address itself.
- Third-party resources—finally, Cloudmark combines its internal sender reputation intelligence with established third-party reputation data sources to supply the most thorough reputation profile of an IP address, helping to identifying whether the address is legitimate or a sender of spam.
In addition to setting a new standard in sender reputation profiling, Cloudmark has also made this data more usable by enabling flexible policy recommendations for message handling tied to Cloudmark Sender Reputation. These policies include dynamic throttling, on-site information lookups (e.g., Reverse and Forward DNS), and access to other complementary data sources. These policies, particularly dynamic throttling, provide ISP customers with unprecedented effectiveness in deterring spammers.
"With the botnet problem growing steadily out of control, the need for a service capable of identifying botnets and stopping spam originating from those compromised IP addresses has gone from a nice-to-have component of ISPs' messaging security solution to mission critical," said Jamie de Guerre, CTO of Cloudmark. "Cloudmark Sender Reputation is the most comprehensive and accurate solution available for authenticating IP addresses, leading to more effective blocking of potential botnet traffic and overall reduction in the volume of messaging attacks invading ISP networks. With the addition of Sender Reputation, Cloudmark Gateway is now the most complete MTA platform on the market."
Pricing and Availability
Cloudmark Gateway is in use at more than a dozen tier one service providers and enterprises in the U.S., Europe and Asia Pacific, and Cloudmark Gateway with Sender Reputation is currently in trials with several major service providers.
Cloudmark Sender Reputation is currently available in the latest version of Cloudmark Gateway and as an add-on for existing Cloudmark Gateway customers.
About Cloudmark Gateway
Cloudmark Gateway, a high-performance edge mail transfer agent (MTA), integrates seamlessly with Cloudmark Authority to deliver the industry's fastest and most accurate edge message filtering. Designed for carrier-class deployments, Cloudmark Gateway empowers service providers with complete control over message handling and policy enforcement at the network edge. Cloudmark Gateway is the first MTA to deliver rich policy capabilities at the edge. Customized policies can be applied at the SMTP stage, before messages are accepted, or at the content stage, once the message has been received. Specific threat mitigation techniques, including anti-denial of service, traffic shaping and connection throttling, can also be applied to limit all forms of messaging abuse. Cloudmark Gateway is designed for easy integration with existing infrastructure, third-party applications and legacy systems. The Cloudmark Gateway edge solution is available in software or appliance configurations based on the service provider's desired implementation scheme and can be deployed seamlessly in any carrier-grade or hosted-messaging environment.
About Cloudmark
Cloudmark builds messaging security software that protects communications service provider networks and their subscribers against the widest range of messaging threats. Only Cloudmark Security Platform™ delivers instant security and control across diverse messaging environments, enabling communications service providers to create a safe user experience, protect revenue and safeguard their brand, while streamlining infrastructure and reducing operational costs. Cloudmark's patented solutions protect more than 120 tier-one customers worldwide, including AT&T, Verizon, Swisscom, Comcast, Cox and NTT.