New anti-spam approach

Oct 4, 2007 14:46 GMT  ·  By

I guess that everyone agrees that spam should be stopped as not only is it annoying but it can have nasty consequences too. A lot of people are fighting it, but it just keeps popping up again and again. No matter how great a spam filter is it still messes some things up - you either end up with false positives (legitimate mails flagged as spam) or the spam wave still hits the inbox. Of course, every company that has developed an anti-spam solution has its own way of making things work, that's why you can't really tell which is the best one. How efficient a spam-filter is also depends on what it has been intended for and who's actually using it.

You can't turn every message containing the word "Viagra" into spam, so that's why researchers have developed another solution. They're flagging messages as spam, by the URLs they use. But spammers knew that, so they've been doing something about it - they've started changing URLs now, so, if one gets blacklisted - no problem, another one just pops up. Also, when having a whole botnet at your disposal it's an easy thing to change a hosting address, this is why spam is so hard to be taken down. However, the Red Condor company has a new approach regarding spam.

Things are different with the Zombie Harvester Robot - this Red Condor technology does more than just look at URLs embedded inside e-mails; as eWeek informs, it also watches for changes and patterns that indicate potential threats. This helps filter out spam a lot better. This is a smart approach, in my opinion and resembles what heuristics is for anti-viruses. So, "Zombie Harvester Robot" isn't just a cool name, it's also a pretty efficient technology, that is now part of the service the company provides.