Messaging security leader Cloudmark, Inc.
announced today that its anti-virus solution has consistently blocked new
virus strains and variants faster and more accurately than competing
solutions since its release in March. Along with the anti-spam and
anti-phishing capabilities in its comprehensive Cloudmark Authority(TM)
solution, Cloudmark’s anti-virus protection leverages a high-performance
architecture and threat detection methodology specifically designed for
service provider networks. More than 50 of the world’s largest ISPs are
currently using Cloudmark Authority to combat viruses, spam, and phishing.
Cloudmark Authority Anti-Virus, a new module that delivers specific
protection against all virus formats, has been adopted by close to a dozen
service providers.
“We began offering a broad range of anti-virus capabilities at the
beginning of the year to round out our end-to-end messaging security
solutions for service providers and it has quickly become a compelling
differentiator for us,” says Vipul Prakash, Founder and Chief Scientist of
Cloudmark. “By blocking new threats and variants in minutes versus the
hours or even days of competitive solutions, we are able to prevent viruses
from infecting a large number of machines and potentially impacting service
availability.”
The Value of Real-time Response
Every minute that a new virus is allowed to propagate across a service
provider’s network can cause exponentially more subscribers to be affected
and, in turn, lead to service degradation and customer dissatisfaction.
Messaging infrastructure providers are increasingly focusing on speed in
containing new threats as critical to an effective anti-virus strategy.
“Our customers report that Cloudmark has blocked every new virus and done
so significantly faster than any other solution,” says Ken Simpson, CEO of
Mail Channels, a Cloudmark OEM partner. “Cloudmark’s effectiveness and
accuracy are at an unprecedented level. Unlike traditional solutions,
Cloudmark blocks viruses before they hit mailboxes, completely eliminating
the virus problem for our customers.”
Intelligent Message Fingerprinting for Viruses
Cloudmark Authority Anti-Virus is able to block new viruses, worms and
mutated threats faster than traditional or other “zero-hour” AV solutions
by virtue of Cloudmark’s unique intelligent message fingerprinting
algorithms. These algorithms generate fingerprints on messages and
attachments for real-time identification of viruses and other threats. If
a single message is found containing a verified virus fingerprint, it will
be blocked.
Cloudmark’s approach contrasts dramatically with systems that rely on rules
or heuristics that tend to be time and resource consuming, or pattern
detection that actually requires witnessing a certain volume of incidents
to spread before starting to block. The latter also leads to large amounts
of false positives since legitimate newsletters and mass mailings may be
blocked as well.
New classes of email viruses and worms are more sophisticated, spreading
rapidly and evolving into variants that stay one step ahead of competitive
anti-virus solutions. Cloudmark anti-virus fingerprints are resistant to
mutations, such as changes in content, sender, URL, and other attributes,
so virus variants are detected and stopped immediately.
Greater Resource Efficiency
Cloudmark’s approach utilizes 1/10th of the system resources of traditional
rules-based anti-virus solutions. Since scanning for all threat types is
performed concurrently on the same platform, there is less drain on
resources than with separate anti-spam, anti-virus, and anti-phishing
solutions. In addition, Authority is uniquely able to process messages at
near wire-speed since messages are scanned against an in-memory cache of
verified virus fingerprints rather than heavy rule-sets.
“The low overhead and fast performance of Cloudmark’s solution have enabled
us to drastically reduce the number of servers required to run our
anti-abuse solution,” says Mark Herbert, founder and director of intY, a
leading European provider of email and Internet services. “Prior to
Cloudmark, new anti-virus rules released by the vendor would drive up CPU
utilization in an unpredictable manner.”
About Cloudmark
Cloudmark, Inc. delivers the industry’s fastest and most accurate
anti-spam, anti-phishing, and anti-virus solutions. Founded in 2001 by
pioneers in messaging anti-abuse, Cloudmark architected an innovative
approach combining intelligent message fingerprinting with the world’s
largest
real-time threat detection network. Cloudmark solutions protect more than
120 million mailboxes and 50+ ISP networks worldwide with customers and
partners including NTT Communications, Time Warner, Cox Communications,
Charter Communications, Vodafone, SUN. A privately held,
San Francisco-based company, Cloudmark’s comprehensive portfolio addresses
the unique needs of Service Provider, enterprise and desktop users. For
more information about Cloudmark, visit http://www.cloudmark.com .
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