Armies of Zombie Spammers Foiled By Roaring Penguin's Hit-And-Run Detection.Business Editors/High-Tech Writers OTTAWA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 26, 2004 Leading Anti-Spam Solution Detects and Preempts New Spammer Tactic, Protects Users From Heavy Spamming See spam. spamming - spam Incidents A new e-mail spamming tactic has been detected and averted a·vert tr.v. a·vert·ed, a·vert·ing, a·verts 1. To turn away: avert one's eyes. 2. by Roaring ROARING. A disease among horses occasioned by the circumstance of the neck of the windpipe being too narrow for accelerated respiration; the disorder is frequently produced by sore throat or other topical inflammation. 2. Penguin Software's CanIt anti-spam solution. A unique feature of CanIt called "hit and run detection" has stopped CanIt customers from receiving thousands of spam E-mail that is not requested. Also known as "unsolicited commercial e-mail" (UCE), "unsolicited bulk e-mail" (UBE), "gray mail" and just plain "junk mail," the term is both a noun (the e-mail message) and a verb (to send it). messages originated in the past few days by zombie A computer that has been covertly taken over in order to perform some nefarious task. It is estimated that millions of PCs around the world have been compromised and, under the control of a third party, routinely transmit messages unbeknownst to the user. spam armies - groups of unwittingly compromised computers A computer that has a virus, Trojan or other malevolent program. See botnet. used as launch pads for spam attacks. "It appears that new spam technology is coordinating delivery attempts among many compromised mail machines in order to bypass realtime blacklists," explained David Skoll, Roaring Penguin's president and CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. . "This kind of spamming tactic is an excellent example of how our hit-and-run detection, also known as greylisting, stops spam even before it reaches the mail server and before time is spent on content-scanning." The recent rash of zombie spam army attacks highlights why only whitelisting or blacklisting alone is insufficient means of fighting spam. Because DNS-based blacklists typically look only at the IP address of the sending machine, spammers are now using these zombie armies to attack from dozens of different machines, thereby increasing the likelihood of finding a machine that is not yet blacklisted. Hit-and-run detection, developed and first introduced by Roaring Penguin in January, 2003, has become a key element in the ability of CanIt products to eliminate about 30% of all spam messages even before they are filtered by CanIt. Using proprietary techniques, CanIt detects the use of spamming software and blocks it before it reaches the server. If the message is legitimate, however, the sending server will resend the message again and be accepted and filtered by CanIt. On one mail server alone, hit-and-run detection stopped 11,370 delivery attempts in the first quarter of 2004. The same server received only 7,601 valid messages during that time, highlighting the extraordinary effectiveness of hit-and-run detection. About Roaring Penguin Founded in 1999, Roaring Penguin Software Inc., specializes in e-mail filtering Email filtering is the processing of e-mail to organize it according to specified criteria. Most often this refers to the automatic processing of incoming messages, but the term also applies to the intervention of human intelligence in addition to artificial intelligence, and to . Since 2000, the company has focused on fighting spam at the mail server, with the acclaimed MIMEDefang and CanIt product lines. Today, Roaring Penguin develops, deploys and supports its spam- and virus-fighting products for customers that include campuses, ISPs, web hosts, government offices and enterprises. For more information visit www.roaringpenguin.com. |
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