From Spam Daily News
CipherTrust free toolbar rates email senders
Posted on
March 15, 2006
Powered by the CipherTrust's TrustedSource reputation engine, the TrustedSource Toolbar brings monitoring, alerting and reporting capabilities to the desktop and provides end users with information to determine if a message is from a trusted, legitimate source.
While numerous toolbars are available for Web site phishing or other browser-based detection, the TrustedSource Toolbar focuses on the end user's first point of contact with a potentially fraudulent or malicious message and provides an immediate recommendation on an e-mail's legitimacy.
The TrustedSource Toolbar leverages data received from CipherTrust's TrustedSource reputation engine. Like a virtual credit agency, TrustedSource assigns a reputation score to each message, and further classifies senders based on an in-depth analysis of each sender. CipherTrust has the largest enterprise install base of any other messaging security appliance vendor, providing a unique view into the overall messaging security ecosystem.
The TrustedSource Toolbar is easy to install and gives end users point-and-click usability and the power to influence sender reputations using innovative features:
-- Graphical Reputation Indicator- leverages proprietary technology to classify the reputation of an incoming message in order to immediately identify any potential threats
-- Spam and Phishing Reporting - offers an easy way for end users to flag and report spam and phishing attacks, influencing global sender reputations
-- Flexible Support - supports multiple mail clients including Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes, with Web-based mail support to follow
"As today's anti-spam technologies have improved, the threats have adapted to become more malicious and fraudulent," said Dr. Paul Judge, chief technology officer at CipherTrust. "Even with 99% catch rates, still one in every 100 unwanted messages will make it to the user's desktop, highlighting an increasing need to provide additional information about the reputation of the sender and the message before the user interacts with the message. We must work together as a community to rebuild trust in the e-mail system, and the TrustedSource Toolbar enables us to donate our reputation intelligence to help stop malicious and fraudulent activity so that the trust may be regained."
The TrustedSource Toolbar is available for free download at the CipherTrust Research Portal at research.ciphertrust.com/toolbar. The Toolbar requires Microsoft .NET Framework version 1.1.4322 to run.
How Does TrustedSource Work?
TrustedSource analyzes billions of messages per month from CipherTrust's global enterprise network of over 4,000 sensors located in enterprises and government institutions. This allows TrustedSource to score IP addresses anywhere on the spectrum of good to bad, depending on both sender history and message characteristics. Senders are graded on very granular scores allowing precision in determining whether a sender is bad, suspicious, or good.
CipherTrust IronMail appliances report back to TrustedSource on all mail flow they are seeing giving TrustedSource a real-time view of worldwide mail traffic. Any deviations from predicted behavior are picked up by TrustedSource and if a new reputation score is derived for a given sender, that new score is immediately available to all IronMail units in the field.
Rather than give the benefit of the doubt to unknown or unfamiliar senders, the system takes a "guilty until proven innocent" approach to reputation scoring. By examining the frequency of e-mail activity from a particular IP address and the quality of the sent messages (via IronMail's Message Profiler), TrustedSource assigns the address a probability of being a spammer or zombie machine that has been taken over by hackers and used to send spam, viruses or other unwanted messages.
Based on information gathered from IronMail units in the field, CipherTrust identified approximately 50 million IP addresses that send approximately 70% of all e-mail on a daily or nearly daily basis. The other 30% comes from IP addresses that have not been previously encountered, and of those messages, over 95% are spam, viruses or other undesirable messages, leading CipherTrust researchers to the conclusion that IP addresses that are encountered for the first time are more than likely zombie machines. CipherTrust typically identifies over 170,000 new zombies a day using this principle. |
SOURCE: CipherTrust, Inc.,