VeriSign service takes on spam

[R. A. Hettinga]

...A whitelist for my friends...

Cheers,
RAH
-------

<http://news.com.com/2102-7355_3-5250010.html?tag=st.util.print>

CNET News

 VeriSign service takes on spam

 By  Dinesh C. Sharma
 Special to CNET News.com
 http://news.com.com/2100-7355-5250010.html

 Story last modified June 28, 2004, 8:11 AM PDT


VeriSign on Monday announced a new e-mail security service designed to stop
viruses and spam.

 The service uses custom blacklists, fingerprinting and heuristic tools,
which calculate the probability that a particular e-mail message is spam by
examining a pattern of characteristics in the message. VeriSign's heuristic
tools use more than 10,000 rules to determine whether a message is spam,
the company said.

 For blocking malicious mail, the service deploys three antivirus engines.
For policy enforcement, customers can use domain-level filtering to scan
inbound and outbound e-mail. And a disaster recovery feature allows for
automatic switchover to VeriSign's network to provide SMTP connections that
queue e-mail, if a company's e-mail server is not available.


The company has begun free trials of the service, which will be available
on July 12. Pricing details were not announced.

 VeriSign said it plans to add more functions, such as verification of
sender identity and domain authentication. Domain names of all incoming
mail will be checked against the company's list of verified domains. This
list will be made available free to antispam software and service providers.

 Although e-mail has become a critical tool for business communication, it
is often saddled with problems caused by spam, viruses and worms.

 Last week, malicious software infected some Web sites, redirecting
visitors to a Russian server that downloaded software onto surfers'
computers. Some have speculated that the purpose of this malicious plan was
spam distribution. Recently, IBM introduced a security management service
to help businesses stop viruses and spam before they enter their networks.

"The introduction of this service will help enterprises restore the
productivity gains from e-mail communication that are now under threat from
spam and viruses," Judy Lin, executive vice president at VeriSign, said in
a statement. "With a service-oriented approach, enterprises can easily
obtain comprehensive e-mail protection in a matter of hours, without
deploying any software or hardware. This service will enable customers to
rely on VeriSign's highly available and scalable infrastructure for
mission-critical functions."


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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'