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. Incidents A new e-mail spamming tactic has been detected and averted by Roaring Penguin Software's CanIt anti-spam solution. A unique feature of CanIt called "hit and run hit and run n. the crime of a driver of a vehicle who is involved in a collision with another vehicle, property or human being, who knowingly fails to stop to give his/her name, license number, and other information as required by statute to the injured party, a witness, or law enforcement officers. detection" has stopped CanIt customers from receiving thousands of spam messages originated in the past few days by zombie A computer system that has been covertly taken over in order to transmit phony messages that slow down service and disrupt the network. A "pulsing zombie" is when the bogus messages are sent in periodic bursts rather than continuously. A "spam zombie" is a system that has been taken over by a virus that relays spam. See denial of service attack and botnet. spam armies - groups of unwittingly compromised computers 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 (1) A list of e-mail addresses of known spammers. See spam, spam filter and Blacklist of Internet Advertisers. Contrast with white list. (2) A list of Web sites that are considered off limits or dangerous. A Web site can be placed on a blacklist because it is a fraudulent operation or because it exploits browser vulnerabilities to send spyware and other unwanted software to the user. Contrast with white list.," explained David Skoll, Roaring Penguin's president and CEO. "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 A computer in a network that provides "post office" facilities. It stores incoming mail for distribution to users and forwards outgoing mail through the appropriate channel. The term may refer to just the software that performs this service, which can reside on a machine with other services. See messaging system. 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. Since 2000, the company has focused on fighting spam at the mail server, with the acclaimed MIMEDefang An open source mail filtering program introduced in 2000 from Roaring Penguin Software Inc., Nepean, Ontario (www.roaringpenguin.com). Written in Perl, MIMEDefang is run in an organization's mail server to delete virus attachments and spam. For more information, visit www.mimedefang.org. 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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