Cloudmark makes Internet safe from spam, viruses

Eighty-five percent to 95% of all e-mail traffic is some form of spam, service providers now say. With this in mind, Cloudmark recently announced steps it is taking to make the Internet safer in the face of viruses and spam. Specific advancements include a safe unsubscribing feature for e-mail newsletters, a zero-hour solution to protect service-provider networks and subscribers, and a global anti-spam/phishing network.

Those who receive unwanted newsletters often face the dilemma of risking having their e-mail address captured and misused upon unsubscribing or wrongly blocking legitimate newsletters by labeling them spam. To alleviate this concern, Cloudmark developed a feature that safely unsubscribes e-mail users from unwanted newsletters and allows service providers and publishers to better accommodate subscriber preferences. This feature lets service providers demonstrate to publishers that a recipient has actively opted out of the distribution list, rather than just labeling an e-mail spam or otherwise.

In the chance that viruses do make an appearance, Cloudmark Authority Zero-Hour Anti-Virus can stop them within 30 seconds to 10 minutes of their first sighting. Cloudmark announced Monday that it has discovered and stopped three new viruses days before other major anti-virus companies addressed them. The viruses, all variants of the Brepibot and IRCBot strains, were stopped by Cloudmark’s unique anti-virus fingerprinting algorithms that capture invariant aspects of malware, enabling fingerprints to cover multiple mutations.

“The combination of speed advantages inherent in our global threat detection network and our automated back-end processing makes our solution extremely fast and accurate at stopping threats at the service provider edge,” Vipul Ved Prakash, founder and chief scientist of Cloudmark, said in a prepared statement.

Taking their anti-spam/phishing network worldwide, Cloudmark also announced that Tele2, Europe’s leading alternative carrier, has selected Cloudmark’s Authority solution for anti-spam, phishing protection and first line virus defense. Tele2’s subscribers across Europe will now have real-time threat detection at the service provider’s network edge, helping to keep infrastructure costs low and subscriber satisfaction high.