10 Things You Should Know About Spam

Between marketers and malware, spam has some powerful perpetrators. Technologies such as fast-flux DNS, which uses a large number of servers and quick-changing domain records, have created botnets with spamming zombies that are hard to take down. In fact,

Polymorphic Malware

Designed to evade signature-based anti-spam tools, polymorphic malware is purposely designed with variations to befuddle anti-spam systems. Reputation and domain identification systems can help prevent this type of malware from g

DomainKeys Identified Mail

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is not an anti-spam technology itself; it is a proposed Internet Engineering Task Force standard for validating a domain name that is associated with a message through cryptographic authen

Sender ID

Sender ID is Microsoft’s authentication and verification protocol. It uses the sender’s IP address to validate e-mail origin.

Phishing

Phishing uses social engineering and technical trickery to steal users’ identities and financial data. And, perversely, legitimate companies’ attempts to create e-mails that customers will be able to recognize as authentic just

Pharming

Pharming software can be delivered via e-mail to direct users to a fraudulent Web site. Pharming usually relies on DNS hijacking.

Reputation

Sender reputation is one way for anti-spam tools to adjudicate incoming messages. Once heralded as the touchstone of anti-spam, reputation has turned out to be an effective tool for marketing departments working with ISPs and others to ge

Challenge-Response

With challenge-response authentication, one party presents a question (the challenge) and another party must provide a valid answer (the response) to be authenticated. Challenge-response systems are not suitable for any organizati

Malware Delivery

Anti-spam tools have been evolving to block all kinds of malware. When evaluating an anti-spam application, be sure to assess its ability to catch spyware, phishing messages, and so on.

On-Premise Anti-Spam

To host or not to host, that is the question. Several years ago, Postini (now owned by Google) and other hosted anti-spam companies made a rather good case for keeping anti-spam filtering off site. Today, companies can effective

Hosted Anti-Spam

Luckily for companies with data that is too important to be trusted to an outside source for storage and anti-spam processing-or for companies for which e-mail is just too big (or too small) to move outside–integrated anti-sp

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