As of today, the 28th of July, Sophos Email Security and Control will be able to better fight botnet propagated spam through the use of Sender Genotype, a next-generation filtering technology. Sender Genotype, unlike traditional filters that rely only on prior information regarding the email sender, identifies aberrant behavior originating from various IP addresses and eliminates spam at the IP-connection level.

Any IP address that does not have the reputation of being a trusted source of messages and suddenly begins to behave strangely is automatically red flagged and messages originating from that IP address will be prevented from reaching the user.

Margit McGrath, Director of Product Management, Email Security and Control, with Sophos comments: "With Sender Genotype, we have emboldened our preventive spam technology to render botnets - the criminal's preferred spamming tactics of the day - virtually ineffective against Sophos Email Security and Control. As a result, customers can realize an increase in system performance while doing away with processing and storing terabytes of unnecessary, potentially harmful data."

According to data gathered by Sophos during the current year, botnet activity is responsible for a staggering 90% of all email traffic. It is getting harder and harder for a traditional filter to keep spam out of your inbox since spam bots become active for a short amount of time and use a dynamically assigned IP address.

Typically, a zombie machine will become active for a few minutes, send out messages to targeted addresses, then become once again inactive. This means that traditional filters are unable to put a stop to these spam messages simply because the spammers use the IP addresses of newly infected zombie machines. Sender Genotype is capable to overcome this weakness by keeping track of connection requests and refusing access to those that appear to be connected with spam botnets.

The most interesting thing about Sender Genotype is the fact that it can block spam from a newly recruited zombie machine that is just now starting to send out messages.