Spam Guard

 

Junk e-mail (also known as "spam") is more than just annoying, it wastes time, money and system resources. As of 2009, it was estimated that 94 percent of e-mail traffic in North America was spam! Additionally, 85% of these spam messages contain a mailicious link that will infect your machine once opened. Spam is not the only problem, malicious e-mails (Internet "worms") can also bring your organization's network to a halt.

 

 

Using Softwink Spamguard © can reduce your spam by 99% while protecting your network against malicious e-mail worms and viruses. Softwink Spamguard sits between your network's e-mail server and the Internet. As e-mail is received, Softwink Spamguard scans every e-mail for malicious attachments and checks to see if it is spam. If the content of an e-mail is malicious or spam, it is stored to a "spam" folder for further review. If an e-mail is "clean", it passes on to your internal e-mail server.

 

How Spamguard Works:

Softwink Spamguard © uses several methods to detect spam and malicious e-mail attachments.

The primary piece of software we use is Spamassassin. This software uses the following techniques to detect spam:

• Header analysis: spammers use a number of tricks to mask their identities, fool you into thinking they've sent a valid mail, or fool you into thinking you must have subscribed at some stage. Spamassassin tries to spot these.

• Text analysis: spam mails often have a characteristic style, and some characteristic disclaimers and CYA text. Spamassassin can spot these, too.

• Blacklists: Spamassassin supports many useful existing blacklists, such as mail-abuse.org, SURBL, and others.

• Learning classifier: Spamassassin uses a Bayesian-like form of probability-analysis classification, so that a user can train it to recognize mails similar to a training set.

• Distributed hash databases: Vipul's Razor , Pyzor and DCC are collaborative spam-tracking databases, which work by taking a signature of spam messages. Since spam typically operates by sending an identical message to hundreds of people, these databases short-circuit this by allowing the first person that receives a spam to add it to the database -- at which point it will automatically be blocked for everyone else.

In addition to Spamassassin, we use MIMEDefang. MIMEDefang is a framework for filtering e-mail. Its primary function is to detect bad e-mail attachments (for example .exe, .bat, .vbs files). It is also used to glue the Worm/Virus software with Spamassassin.

Softwink Spamguard uses ClamAV to detect worms and viruses. ClamAV is automatically kept up-to-date by checking in with the primary database daily (in some cases, several times a day).

Softwink Spamguard can also be configured to function with several commercial products. For more information, please contact us.