Today’s announcement by Mail2World, Inc., a
global provider of on-demand, hosted email and collaboration services,
introduces strong new countermeasures deployed by the company against the
recent surge of image-based spam. Image spam replaces text with images or a
combination of images and text in an attempt to evade traditional,
text-based anti-spam filters. When image spam attacks intensified in the
second quarter of 2006, Mail2World moved quickly to protect its customers
and their end users by enhancing the company’s multilayered Pangia
Protect(TM) filtering technology at a time when other email providers’
users were still struggling with the more common text-based spam.
“We’ve seen image-based spam jump to almost 25 percent of all nuisance mail
hitting our global email systems, which currently handle more than one
billion messages a month,” states Mail2World’s Executive Vice President and
COO Youssef Abed. “With our latest upgrade to Pangia Protect, we’re
confident we can frustrate spammers using this devious new scheme.”
Mail2World’s experience echoes that of other organizations who report huge
bandwidth and storage overloads from image-based spam, which is typically
three times the file size of text-based spam. According to Michael
Osterman, an analyst writing in the July 16, 2006 issue of Network World
Magazine: “That means organizations need to use either in-house perimeter
defenses in order to block image spam before it has to be processed using
CPU-intensive spam filtering techniques, or they need to use a managed
service that will prevent email from reaching the network and thereby
consume additional bandwidth and storage.”
Mail2World’s new release of Pangia Protect 3.0 includes the ability to
decode images in spam, detect recurrent patterns in similar messages and
block image-based spam. Its protection strategy is partially based on the
most fundamental characteristic of all malware: mass distribution over the
Internet. Rather than evaluating each individual message, large volumes of
Internet traffic are analyzed in real time. New spam and malware outbreaks
are identified as soon as they emerge, resulting in instant protection from
new outbreaks far ahead of signatures or software updates. “Our customers
will never know they were the target of image spam attacks,” adds Abed.
“Unless of course, they set their feature-rich, anti-spam controls to
collect spam in their Junk Mail folder or send tagged spam to another
folder, such as Inbox.”
About Pangia Protect
Pangia Protect 3.0 is offered by Mail2World as a fully managed service
providing comprehensive, affordable protection against spam and viruses for
businesses of all sizes, ISPs, portals and educational institutions. Pangia
Protect dynamically and transparently scans, detects and quarantines image-
and text-based spam and viruses, providing comprehensive online reports for
end users and administrators. A fully hosted, integrated solution, Pangia
Protect’s multiple scanning engines and image decoders provide a 98.2
percent catch rate with 99.99 percent false-positive protection for
incoming, outgoing and internal email traffic. Pangia Protect is included
with Mail2World’s hosted email service at no additional cost and may be
purchased as part of Mail2World’s Email FailSafe Service. For more
information, please visit http://www.mail2world.net/net/services/EFSVPS.asp
or call (310) 209-0060 x101.
About Mail2World
Mail2World, Inc. ( www.mail2world.net ) designs, delivers and supports a
technology-leading and award-winning suite of hosted business-class email
and online collaboration services. Custom-engineered to handle tens of
millions of mailboxes, Mail2World’s Pangia Communications Platform(TM)
addresses the growing need for advanced, ultra-reliable and
cost-effective email and collaboration in global enterprises, small and
medium-sized businesses and large-scale service providers. The company’s
growing list of customers includes prominent organizations from around the
world, such as publicly traded corporations, top-ten colleges listed in
Newsweek’s America’s Best Colleges 2007 report and some of the largest and
most-recognized online properties. Founded in early 2000, Mail2World is a
privately held corporation headquartered in Los Angeles, Calif.
Carol Mason
Tel: (310) 209-0060 x103
Fax: (310) 209-0079
Email Contact
Information provided by: Findarticles.com
