Sophos, the world's largest privately held security software
firm today announced that its Sophos Email
Security and Control offerings will now include Sender Genotype, a
next-generation reputation filtering technology, designed to
eliminate botnet spam at the IP-connection level. Unlike
traditional reputation filters, which rely on prior knowledge of
the sender, Sender Genotype effectively identifies aberrant
behavior from IP addresses, which have not yet established a
reputation and immediately blocks them from connecting to Sophos
customers' mail systems.
Based on data collected in 2008, SophosLabs™ estimates that botnets
generate nearly 90% of all spam worldwide. This issue is compounded
by the fact that spam bots appear online for mere minutes at a time
to send targeted messages, often using dynamically assigned IP
addresses and low traffic volume to bypass traditional reputation
filtering. Sophos Sender Genotype overcomes this inherent weakness
by monitoring connection requests and rejecting those showing
evidence of botnet connections. Even a new or unknown sender IP
(e.g. a newly recruited bot) that has never before sent a message
can be blocked using Sophos's breakthrough technology.
"With Sender Genotype, we have emboldened our preventive spam
technology to render botnets - the criminal's preferred spamming
tactics of the day - virtually ineffective against Sophos Email
Security and Control," said Margit McGrath, Director of Product
Management, Email Security and Control, at Sophos. "As a result,
customers can realize an increase in system performance while doing
away with processing and storing terabytes of unnecessary,
potentially harmful data."
Sender Genotype is a free, seamless upgrade option for existing
and prospective customers of Sophos Email Appliances and
PureMessage for UNIX.
In addition to the development of Sender Genotype to counter the
ever-increasing volumes of spam, Sophos recently delivered Sophos eXtensible Lists (SXL)
to its Email Security and Control solutions portfolio. SXL is an
online look-up system that dramatically accelerates the
distribution of anti-spam intelligence, moving away from
traditional scheduled updates to a real-time system that provides
quicker response to new and emerging spam campaigns.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.