Anti Services Spam

CA, Inc. recently announced a distribution agreement with Yahoo! Inc. to deliver a co-branded version of its Yahoo! Toolbar with the upcoming releases of all CA Home/Home Office products including its upcoming CA Internet Security Suite Plus 2008. The company also announced that CA Anti-Spyware will continue to power the Anti-Spy function of Yahoo! Toolbar, providing toolbar users with free, comprehensive protection against a wide range of spyware, adware, keyloggers, browser hijackers and other threats.

In addition to providing comprehensive protection against viruses, hackers, spyware, spam, and identity thieves with CA Internet security software, the CA/Yahoo! toolbar will offer CA Home/Home Office customers the opportunity to enhance their Internet experience with a more convenient desktop search, simple customization of toolbars, email alerts, and easy access to CA links and services.

MessageLabs Intelligence Report: Spammers Making PDF Spam More Sophisticated

MessageLabs, a leading provider of integrated messaging and web security services to businesses worldwide, today announced the findings of its MessageLabs Intelligence Report for July 2007. Continuing last month's trend, spam sent as PDF attachments remained a preferred tactic for the bad guys, but MessageLabs saw increased adoption by more professional spammers who are now modifying the PDF files to bypass detection.

Approximately 20 percent of all image spam now involves PDFs. In some of the most recent examples, the PDF documents were created programmatically with document protection settings enabled -- features that make spam more likely to bypass detection by typical anti-spam scanners. MessageLabs also noted the PDFs still contained "Bayes Poison," which are long lists of randomly selected words that are unlikely to appear in a normal spam message, as an added cover to evade detection.

Hosted Processors:

Hosted e-mail filtering services use the readily available processing power of Internet data centers. Vendors in this category include AppRiver, MessageLabs, MXLogic, and Google-Postini, among others.

Filter Appliance: This class integrates software with a hardware appliance, tuning the package for optimal processing performance. Vendors in this category include Barracuda, Borderware, McAfee, and Secure Computing, among others.

Commercial Filters: This class tends to be virus filtering software with extended anti-spam functionality. Vendors that offer this class of anti-spam software include McAfee, Symantec, and TrendMicro, among others.

Real-time Black Lists: These reputation based systems collect feedback from users to manage a 'black list' of known spammer IP addresses and domains.