Internet Defense Technologies

Firstly you do not need to install yet another piece of Software on your computers, and if you have a company of any size this can for sure be cumbersome, even if it is a server side push install to the whole base.

Spam and AV Software is known to slow windows systems down drastically, which is another good reason to migrate these things to a service where you can.  The less software you have on a windows system that needs to use the windows registry the better off that system will be.  Also, another great reason to move to a service is you can increase bandwidth on your LAN (Local Area Network).  The reason for this is obvious, resources are not being hung up by too much Spam.

The SAAS Market is new and exciting, from my viewpoint its the best thing to happen to the whole industry.  Take away system resource hogs and put them somewhere else, and managed by others that are professionals in their own area.

This saves TIME AND MONEY for any company, and in this Economy, we need to do just that.

Spam levels have surged to the highest in about a year and a half. Image spam, a technique not seen for some years has resurfaced and at extremely heavy volume.

Image spam can be difficult to detect due to it’s lack of easily identifiable content.

Images are used commonly on many on-line systems today to validate user logins to websites such as ebay, financial institutions and many others. The purpose of these is to ensure that a real person (and not a computer program) is logging in to a given system.

Many of you have undoubtedly had to decipher hazy characters, letters and numbers in order to change a password, sign up for an account or bid for an item. This is precisely why image spam is difficult to detect - using the same rationale, spammers reason that since email systems are automated and individual messages are not monitored individually by people, sending spam that simply contains an image is a great way to defeat many spam filtering systems.

This may account for the increase in spam you are seeing and we have recently published an article on some safe computing habits you should implement.

Our CTO and founder, Ron Edison, recently wrote an article for Business Solutions Magazine called Philosophies of Spam Solutions.  It is now being featured on their website and I wanted to give you an excerpt here:

While spam by the billions reaches out to users around the globe, they are scanned, blocked, deleted, sorted, filtered, rejected, quarantined, moved, dropped, replied to, and bounced by a panorama of spam solutions and email systems as varied as they are many. Accompanying the ubiquity of spam is a mixed bag of strategies and applications to deal with it.

And, while users rail at spam, they typically complain far louder about “false positives” (legitimate messages treated, blocked, etc., incorrectly by spam filtering systems) — and for good reason. If there’s anything worse than getting drowned in spam, many users agree, it is missing “that all important message”, which at least seemingly is often subject to collateral damage as servers wage their constant battle with spam. Here there is opportunity for an effective solution as long as it can deliver accuracy.

While spam and its effects have been the topic of endless discourse, rarely mentioned in much detail is the underlying philosophy or even exact goal of one solution or another. Certainly, one could say that — of course — the goal is to block all spam and deliver all “ham” (the colloquial for “legitimate email”), but there is more to this than meets the eye.

Enter “reputation.” (read more)