Why most ISPs can`t stop spam

ISPs are finding it increasingly difficult to adequately stop spam. It is no longer acceptable, nor fiscally viable, to wait for spam to arrive on your network, and then filter based on content. Companies can no longer rely on outdated spam prevention technologies that filter based on known content alone.

Anti-spam solutions should provide continuous and automatic updates, integrate at the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) or Internet Mail Connector (IMC) level and allow integration with Exchange 2003 and Intelligent Mail Filter (IMF) compatibility. With the information workplace becoming increasingly global, companies require technology such as Recurrent Pattern Detection that has the ability to provide anti-spam protection in real-time and in multiple languages, argues Grant Chapman, MD of Camsoft Solutions.

The last few months has seen the number of spam attacks more than double those experienced during 2004 to an average of 1 million outbreaks per day. Today`s outbreaks also spread at phenomenal speed, congesting and infecting networks faster than ever before. The average duration of a spam attack has also shortened dramatically from two days at the beginning of 2003 to an average of six hours in the first quarter of 2005.

To host their attacks, spammers registered more than 369 000 domains during 2004, for which they paid over $26 million in registration costs. The 38 400 domains registered in December alone were used to create over 6 million URLs directed to a variety of different spammer Web sites.

Commtouch, the developer of patented Recurrent Pattern Detection (RPD) technology for real-time anti-spam and zero-hour virus protection, reports that over 99.94% of spammer URLs each month were new compared with the URLs associated with spam messages in previous months. Typically each such domain would be utilised by the spammer for only a few days to avoid detection by those anti-spam and content filtering technologies which do not have the technological ability to detect and stop spam in real-time.

Virus outbreaks as a result of spam now also spread in minutes and peak within hours with the result that response time to spam has become the critical challenge of the messaging security industry. This is where RPD technology has become a vital tool in an organisation`s arsenal of methods to combat spam where honeypots, Bayesian filters, content rules and blacklists have proved inadequate.

RPD is based on the most fundamental characteristic of all Malware - its mass distribution over the Internet.

Rather than evaluating each individual message, RPD technology analyses large volumes of Internet traffic in real time. New spam and malware outbreaks are identified as soon as they emerge, and recorded in the Signatures-Repository. Commtouch Gateways deployed by customers worldwide query the Signatures-Repository and receive message classification in real-time. The result is instant protection from new outbreaks - far ahead of signatures or software updates.

Leading messaging and security vendors have licensed or embedded Commtouch`s RPD technology, which protects over 35 million users worldwide and RPD is recognised by key industry analysts as a leading technology in e-mail outbreak detection. It achieves the industry`s best detection/accuracy performance (Osterman Research, 2004) and fastest detection of new spam (IDC, 2004). RPD technology is effective against spam, fraud, phishing and malware. As long as the e-mail-born threat is mass-distributed over the Internet, Commtouch`s RPD technology can detect and block it. Technological benefits include:

* Equally effective for all languages and formats
* Real-time protection from the very first moment a new outbreak emerges (IDC,2004)
* Proven +97% detection rate The industry`s highest accuracy levels - under 1:27 500 (Osterman Research)
* A future-proof method - cannot be circumvent by spam/malware senders
* Fully automated detection