IronPort Systems Helps Web Hosts to Fight Against Spam

IronPort Systems (www.ironport.com) announced the second generation of its Reputation Filters, which now allows ISPs to stop spam from originating in their networks. In an effort to thwart first generation reputation based spam filtering systems, spammers have created "Zombies" or computers that have been infected with a virus and then hijacked to send spam.

These Zombies are most often found in the large IP ranges of consumer
broadband ISPs such as cable operators and DSL providers.

IronPort Systems, the inventors of reputation-based defenses, has released the second generation of their Reputation Filters™. The second generation system uses the industry's broadest set of data - analyzing more than 50 different parameters from more than 50,000 participating networks.

This massive quantity of data is analyzed in real time and used to develop a "reputation score" for any given sender on the Internet. This score is made available to the IronPort Email Security Appliances which have a unique
ability to rate limit a given sender based on their score. The more suspicious a sender appears, the slower they go.

"The technology is sophisticated, but the concept is simple," said Craig Taylor, Vice President of Technology at IronPort.

One the greatest challenge in fighting spam is dealing with the ever-growing flood of incoming messages. A typical enterprise user that gets 100,000 legitimate messages a day will need to accept and process more than 1 million incoming messages before weeding out the spam from the legitimate mail.

This huge volume of incoming junk mail can saturate a T1 line and overwhelm several banks of traditional servers.

The second generation of IronPort's Reputation Filtering leverages IronPort's rate limiting capability to monitor and manage outbound email traffic with real time analysis of global email traffic patterns.

The key to effective reputation filtering is having a very large, very diverse set of data to analyze email traffic patterns. IronPort Systems owns SenderBase, the world's first and largest email traffic monitoring service. SenderBase collects data from more than 50,000 ISPs, universities, and corporations around the world.

SenderBase has the most accurate view of the sending patterns of any given
mail sender because of the size of the database, and conversely the database is the world's largest because of the accuracy of the data.

IronPort licenses SenderBase data to the open-source community and other institutions that are participating in the fight against spam.