Email viruses and worms are more sophisticated than ever. They propagate rapidly and evolve into variants that stay one step ahead of anti-virus rules. These new classes of viruses defy traditional anti-virus solutions because they initially appear at such low volumes that they are missed by honeypots and probes. While they start out small, they exponentially increase distribution, causing widespread damage to subscriber computers and overloading networks.

The High Cost of Delay

Every minute counts when it comes to stopping viruses. Unchecked viruses grow exponentially, generating real costs in terms of maintenance, customer support, and infrastructure for the service provider. Traditional anti-virus solutions depend on a team of people who must analyze data, write, test and distribute rules, resulting in response time delays of hours to days. In the meantime, virus-laden messages continue to flow into users' inboxes until these rules are distributed.

Industry's Fastest Response Time

Cloudmark Authority® Anti-Virus does not need to detect a large number of attacks to begin blocking. It also does not require manual intervention or endless rules writing. Cloudmark Authority Anti-Virus stops viruses and their variants before traditional and even other "zero-hour" solutions, narrowing the service provider's window of vulnerability significantly.

How? Cloudmark Authority Anti-Virus works in an automated fashion: virus samples are collected and isolated within a minute of attack origination. Fingerprints are automatically created by Cloudmark's new anti-virus algorithm, which is specifically designed to identify viruses even in their mutated forms (for example, changes in text, code, URL, sender and image).

Precise Protection

Just as important as fast response is accurate response. Some "zero hour" anti-virus systems can sideline suspect messages for hours or days while they are checked against identified virus signatures. Legitimate email may be quarantined or discarded by imprecise heuristics. Cloudmark Authority Anti-Virus uses real-time corroborated feedback from millions of trusted sources to instantly sort out messages containing viruses while not delaying legitimate messages.

Infrastructure and Operational Efficiency

Traditional AV solutions are processing-intensive, claiming thousands of rules per day, and thus require more and more hardware as messaging threats continue to grow. This load is further compounded as additional subscribers enter the system. Cloudmark Authority Anti-Virus, on the other hand, uses lightweight fingerprinting algorithms that process messages at wire-speed while reducing CPU utilization by up to 90%. Cloudmark Authority provides comprehensive messaging abuse protection while minimizing infrastructure and operational costs.