Noviembre 2006

BorderWare Delivers Patent-Pending Technology To Defeat Image Spam

Toronto, ON – November 13, 2006 – BorderWare Technologies, a global vendor of messaging security, privacy and compliance solutions, today announced its new patent-pending Intercept™ Image Analysis technology specifically designed to detect and block image spam. In the last six months, spam rates have tripled and image spam accounts for nearly 35% of overall traffic . Image spam is the latest tactic for bypassing current anti-spam technology. On any given day over 25 image spam campaigns are being run  resulting in lost productivity and end-user frustration. As a result, organizations are struggling to protect against this latest threat in spam attacks. 

Increasingly, spam is being designed to bypass current filters used by other vendors including Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and fingerprinting, rendering these techniques ineffective in protecting against image spam.  For example, spammers are using speckling, rare fonts, and text smearing to bypass detection from OCR.  In addition, they are using invisible variations, such as image sizing and randomized speckling, to circumvent fingerprinting techniques.

With the introduction of the Intercept™ Image Analysis technology to an already extensive list of threat detection classification methods, BorderWare is delivering superior capture rates, improved performance in threat detection and prevention, and increased productivity to organizations of all sizes.

BorderWare's MXtreme email security and filtering technology, Intercept™, uses a wide range of techniques to distinguish between ‘good' and ‘bad' emails. These classification techniques include the use of blocklists, reputation and behavior analysis (based on the BorderWare Security Network), textual analysis, and other heuristics. With BorderWare's new patent-pending Intercept™ Image Analysis technology, BorderWare has the unique ability to learn about new image spam campaigns and defends against spam techniques by analyzing image attachments found within an email message to derive an accurate characterization of the message. This new analysis acts as additional input to the overall classification of a mail message by tracking 30 pieces of information about an image to accurately identify it as spam and relieve the business pain it causes.

“As the spammers think up new ways to threaten email systems, it's critical that we remain one step ahead of them,” said Tim Leisman, CEO of BorderWare. “Using BSN, our real-time, multi-protocol behavior analysis service, we see these campaigns as they are beginning to gain momentum, which allows us to be agile and react immediately to defend against attacks, as we have done with blocking image spam.”

“BorderWare's commitment to delivering innovative technology to secure email, such as this latest spam threat, is why they're a valuable partner to Cyberklix,” said John Menezes, Cyberklix. “Image spam has become a top concern and frustration for our customers in recent months and we're pleased to be able to deliver a complete anti-spam solution that is unlike any other on the market.”