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A Reputation-based Approach to Efficiently Filtering Spam
Current Scenario: During the past 18 months, global surges in spam and phishing attacks have cost businesses and consumers millions and caused subscribers to pressure ISPs and other email service providers to address the problem at the network edge. Cloudmark’s “reputation-based” methodology provides the fastest, most accurate and globally viable solution, leveraging the intelligence of users, automated response and service provider networks in tandem. By employing a trust system that rates reporters’ accuracy over time, Cloudmark is able to positively identify real spam and phishing threats while discounting reports by scammers attempting to gain and trick the system. Translation: world-leading accuracy.
Tomorrow's Technology Today: Cloudmark’s messaging security platforms -- anti-spam, phishing and virus -- use a collaborative approach in which reporters worldwide flag malicious messages in real-time. With more than 100 million mailboxes protected worldwide, Cloudmark repeatedly surpasses the competition in third-party tests, delivering the greatest speed and accuracy and fewest “false positives.” Cloudmark excels in accuracy in particular due to its use of reputation ratings. Reporters’ individual accuracy in flagging messages for evaluation by automated fingerprinting algorithm systems is tracked over time. As a reporter becomes one of the most trusted, others are evaluated based on their performance and how well their reporting corroborates that of the most trusted reporters. Those attempting to deceive the system – spammers for example who assert that spam is legitimate –and those erroneously identifying things like unwanted newsletters as spam, lost trust. Their identification alone would not be acted upon the same way a trusted reporter’s would. At the core of the Cloudmark Collaborative Security Network ™ (CCSN) is the Trust Evaluation System™ (TeS). TeS ensures the “reputation” of reporters by tracking how often the larger recipient community agrees with their assessment of a message. In addition, Cloudmark uses an automated system of highly-proficient, fingerprinting algorithms. Message fingerprints maintain the privacy of the content and reduce the amount of data to be analyzed. Once a message fingerprint is cataloged as spam, all future messages matching that fingerprint are automatically filtered. Because a reputation-based collaborative system does not draw blanket conclusions about terms, hosts, or people, it has proven to increase accuracy, particularly as it relates to false positives and critical false positives, while simultaneously decreasing administration costs. The first prototype of Cloudmark’s classifier, Vipul’s Razor, was developed by Cloudmark founder Vipul Ved Prakash and released as an Open Source project in 1998. In 2001, along with a major update to Razor (Razor2), Vipul co-founded Cloudmark. Today, the collaborative classifier that underlies Razor2, and all of Cloudmark’s products, is known as the Cloudmark Network Classifier™ (CNC). The goal of CNC is to accurately determine if a message is spam or legitimate email based on the first few reports so that only a few reporters are necessary to train the classifier for a new spam attack. At the core of CNC is a reputation metric analyzer that ensures the integrity of user-submitted feedback by modeling historical consensus and disagreement in the recipient community. This automated and real-time approach significantly reduces the individual training and corporate administrative cost. Along with the millions of email users protected (and protecting themselves), Cloudmark’s Authority solutions shield service providers from the profitability and retention issues arising from bad spam filtering and inefficient solutions. Spam essentially consists of a single message seen by a large number of individuals, and Cloudmark distributes the training load associated with an automated spam filter across a large community of individuals who all receive the same unwanted messages. The collaborative decision making of the community reduces the cost of accuracy, such as that associated with misclassification of a message. Cloudmark addresses unique technological challenges and CapEx/OpEx constraints of Service Provider networks – storage and server costs in particular – along with reducing support costs to restore false positives. In turn, customer satisfaction and retention are maximized, along with service margin, while offering competitively priced services. Best known for its accuracy and speed blocking spam and phishing attacks, Cloudmark’s zero-hour anti-virus capabilities detect and deter email-borne viruses exponentially faster than the leading solutions, often minutes versus hours or even days. Here again, reputation-based tagging of emails bearing viruses can occur within minutes of a launch preventing the entire rest of the Cloudmark-protected universe from ever receiving the email. Backed by the industry’s most sophisticated and efficient fingerprinting methodology system, the real-time reporting of users sustains accuracy worldwide as messages are read and evaluated in native languages.
Tomorrow's Technology Today: Cloudmark’s messaging security platforms -- anti-spam, phishing and virus -- use a collaborative approach in which reporters worldwide flag malicious messages in real-time. With more than 100 million mailboxes protected worldwide, Cloudmark repeatedly surpasses the competition in third-party tests, delivering the greatest speed and accuracy and fewest “false positives.”
Cloudmark excels in accuracy in particular due to its use of reputation ratings. Reporters’ individual accuracy in flagging messages for evaluation by automated fingerprinting algorithm systems is tracked over time. As a reporter becomes one of the most trusted, others are evaluated based on their performance and how well their reporting corroborates that of the most trusted reporters. Those attempting to deceive the system – spammers for example who assert that spam is legitimate –and those erroneously identifying things like unwanted newsletters as spam, lost trust. Their identification alone would not be acted upon the same way a trusted reporter’s would.
At the core of the Cloudmark Collaborative Security Network ™ (CCSN) is the Trust Evaluation System™ (TeS). TeS ensures the “reputation” of reporters by tracking how often the larger recipient community agrees with their assessment of a message. In addition, Cloudmark uses an automated system of highly-proficient, fingerprinting algorithms. Message fingerprints maintain the privacy of the content and reduce the amount of data to be analyzed. Once a message fingerprint is cataloged as spam, all future messages matching that fingerprint are automatically filtered. Because a reputation-based collaborative system does not draw blanket conclusions about terms, hosts, or people, it has proven to increase accuracy, particularly as it relates to false positives and critical false positives, while simultaneously decreasing administration costs.
The first prototype of Cloudmark’s classifier, Vipul’s Razor, was developed by Cloudmark founder Vipul Ved Prakash and released as an Open Source project in 1998. In 2001, along with a major update to Razor (Razor2), Vipul co-founded Cloudmark. Today, the collaborative classifier that underlies Razor2, and all of Cloudmark’s products, is known as the Cloudmark Network Classifier™ (CNC). The goal of CNC is to accurately determine if a message is spam or legitimate email based on the first few reports so that only a few reporters are necessary to train the classifier for a new spam attack.
At the core of CNC is a reputation metric analyzer that ensures the integrity of user-submitted feedback by modeling historical consensus and disagreement in the recipient community. This automated and real-time approach significantly reduces the individual training and corporate administrative cost.
Along with the millions of email users protected (and protecting themselves), Cloudmark’s Authority solutions shield service providers from the profitability and retention issues arising from bad spam filtering and inefficient solutions. Spam essentially consists of a single message seen by a large number of individuals, and Cloudmark distributes the training load associated with an automated spam filter across a large community of individuals who all receive the same unwanted messages. The collaborative decision making of the community reduces the cost of accuracy, such as that associated with misclassification of a message.
Cloudmark addresses unique technological challenges and CapEx/OpEx constraints of Service Provider networks – storage and server costs in particular – along with reducing support costs to restore false positives. In turn, customer satisfaction and retention are maximized, along with service margin, while offering competitively priced services.
Best known for its accuracy and speed blocking spam and phishing attacks, Cloudmark’s zero-hour anti-virus capabilities detect and deter email-borne viruses exponentially faster than the leading solutions, often minutes versus hours or even days. Here again, reputation-based tagging of emails bearing viruses can occur within minutes of a launch preventing the entire rest of the Cloudmark-protected universe from ever receiving the email.
Backed by the industry’s most sophisticated and efficient fingerprinting methodology system, the real-time reporting of users sustains accuracy worldwide as messages are read and evaluated in native languages.
Conclusion: Users of Cloudmark spam-filtering, both service providers and their protected subscriber bases, derive five key advantages from using Cloudmark: Elimination of “false positives” Accurate, real-time blocking of new threats in native languages Zero-hour virus protection Infrastructure cost reduction Tracking, feedback mechanism for demonstrating progress
Conclusion: Users of Cloudmark spam-filtering, both service providers and their protected subscriber bases, derive five key advantages from using Cloudmark:
Cloudmark, Inc. 128 King Street Second Floor San Francisco CA 94107 USA Tel: 1-415 543-1220
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