Cloudmark

"ScrambleSpam" is plaguing inboxes, but SpamNet users are safe

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The world's first and largest spamfighting community allows Cloudmark to discover and stop the latest strain of spam

SAN FRANCISCO — March 20, 2003 — Cloudmark, the company that empowers consumers to fight spam, today announced that it has discovered and stopped ScrambleSpam, a new and unique strain of spam that continues to evade the majority of anti-spam filters today. Cloudmark released SpamNet Beta 9, the first, easy-to-use Microsoft® Outlook® add-in now including Outlook 2003 Beta 2 support, to keep the largest spamfighting community in the world safe from ScrambleSpam. More than 320,000 spamfighters have joined forces through SpamNet, to stop more and more spam each day and help others. In addition, the strength of the community and their spam reports allow Cloudmark to build new defenses into SpamNet's core technology to be the first to stop new strains of spam like ScrambleSpam. This latest technology breakthrough delivers accuracy results that soar above anything the SpamNet community has raved about before. In fact the new version of SpamNet is reportedly stopping more than 95 percent of spam with no false positives and is available for free at www.cloudmark.com/spamnet

"I have been using SpamNet for several months to block over 100 daily spam messages," says Macon G of Orange Beach, Alabama. "It's been working well all along, but I am blown away by this newest release that is consistently blocking almost 100 percent of my spam."

"Many spam-fighting tools work...but SpamNet works perfectly. It integrates seamlessly into Outlook and it's the first anti-spam add-on to work with Outlook 2003 Beta 2," says Larry McJunkin, VP Operations, Windows Users Group Network (WUGNET). "SpamNet is easy to use, but most importantly it captures over 97 percent of the 200+ spam messages I receive daily."

Move over Bacon, there's a New Spam in Town

ScrambleSpam takes changing each message to a new level. Until this new strain appeared, spammers limited the randomness in a spam message to 5 to 10 percent of the message. In ScrambleSpam, up to 90 percent of the content can be random characters that don't trigger pattern matching filters and confuse simplistic signature schemes. ScrambleSpam also avoids telltale spam signs in favor of an image link that sneaks past filters. For example, A ScrambleSpam looks like this:

Good-bye ScrambleSpam, Office 2003 support and more:

• ScrambleSpam Defense: Cloudmark discovered this new strain of spam and the threat it poses because it maintains the largest, real-time database of spam in the world. ScrambleSpam temporarily defeated SpamNet's filters, but the strength of the SpamNet community put an end to it. SpamNet's collaborative spamfighting success is based on the community reporting, or Blocking any spam that slips through SpamNet to stop spam for the rest of the community. SpamNet's scientists are then able to analyze the gigabytes of spam provided by the community to identify new spamming techniques. In this case, Cloudmark developed a new scientific technique to stop ScrambleSpam.
• Support for Office 2003 Beta 2: SpamNet Beta 9 delivers the same over the top accuracy results for Office 2003, Beta 2 users. Because so many SpamNet users are Office 2003 Beta testers, Cloudmark made it a priority to make SpamNet beta 9 compliant with the new Microsoft Office security API for Outlook add-ins.
• Auto-Unblock for Newsletters: New Auto-Unblock feature ensures your newsletters stay out of the spam folder, avoiding false positives. Now, when you Unblock an email from the same address twice, SpamNet will pop-up an option for you to always receive mail from that address.
• Full Microsoft Exchange Compatibility: SpamNet now fully supports Microsoft Exchange mail server. This release automatically scans all Exchange messages that are delivered to the Inbox.
• ActiveScan: Supports monitoring multiple folders in real-time and is constantly running in the background so you're always protected from spam.

IETF and ASRG involvement:

Cloudmark is attending the first-ever Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG) and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) anti-spam meeting today in San Francisco in an effort to provide its expertise on fighting spam.

Availability

SpamNet is available for free from the Cloudmark web site at www.cloudmark.com. This current version of SpamNet will remain free, so that customers currently contributing to the network can continue fighting spam successfully. Cloudmark will also be delivering a pay-for release 1.0 version in the near future. To enable even more people to take advantage of SpamNet, Cloudmark will deliver support for other popular mail clients in the coming year. Large companies looking for a gateway, or server-side solution that prevents unwanted email from entering your network, please visit www.cloudmark.com/products/authority/ to learn more about our award-winning enterprise solution - Cloudmark Authority.

About SpamNet

For the first time, SpamNet enables consumers to fight back against spam with a single click. SpamNet is safe, seamless, and transparent to the consumer. It saves people time by stopping 90 percent of spam automatically, so they only see the mail they care about. SpamNet never deletes an email; it is just moved to the "spam" folder.

Every time a consumer uses the one-click "block" feature to remove spam from their inbox, they also notify the SpamNet community at large. This automatically blocks spam for all other SpamNet consumers. Similarly, if a person thinks a certain message is not spam, they can click an "unblock" button and share that knowledge with the network. SpamNet has a Truth Evaluation System (TeS) to guarantee that only valid spam messages are blocked. This solution enables "spamfighters" to work together and as the community grows, SpamNet gets more effective.

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.