07/14/2008

Our partner in spam blocking, Cloudmark, has just received a patent on their Global Threat Network system. What an exciting announcement! For the last 5 years, we have been asserting that the Community Approach to Blocking Spam is the best way to beat the spammers. Although the spammers have made some counter attacks, the Cloudmark technology that we integrate into SpamSentinel consistently self-corrects and finds a way to block the spam. It first dealt with polymorphic spam, then random poetry inside the message, then images, then viruses, and on and on.

Here is a quote from Cloudmark:

"This patented technology, the Global Threat Network system, is the industry's first collaborative threat detection system. The Global Threat Network system consists of 600 million trusted reporting sources, including service provider abuse teams, systems administrators, honeypots and users, who report e-mail messages into the system in real-time. Corroborated feedback from these reporters enables Cloudmark to automatically block new spam, phishing and virus outbreaks within minutes of the original attack."

The Community Blocking idea started with one of the founders of Napster who said "What can I do with a million people, now that they cannot share music anymore"? He created a collaborative filter, working with Vipul's Razor, to let the community decide what is spam and what is good mail. Leon Rishniw, a colleague and VP of Engineering at Cloudmark, had this to say:

"The Global Threat Network is the first and largest trusted collaborative threat detection system in the world," said Rishniw. "This patented technology gives Cloudmark customers unmatched protection against emerging threats"

So, while we Lotus Notes users are going in for all things community in a big way, SpamSentinel has been utilizing a community approach for 5 years. Here is a t-shirt from Admin 2006, stating:
What can 10 Million People Do to make the World a better place? The other side says the answer: Stop Spam! And now that approach is patented!




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