Dec
10
Written by:
System SuperUser
12/10/2007 5:13 PM
We’ve had complaints about increased spam and spam filters malfunctioning from most of our clients, so we did the research to find out what can truly be done about it without diverting lots of false positives to the Junk mail folder. Apparently, a synchronized group of thousands of Russian hackers cracked into databases and hijacked hundreds of thousands of computers and turned them into spambots that are connected into botnets without the owners knowledge. Worldwide spam tripled within a few months.
The botnets were established late last year, and everyone started to see the effects in around March/April and it just keeps getting worse. These new changes have overloaded normal software-based spam filters simply with brute force volumes of email and sophisticated image strategies. The most effective way of blocking spam now is using a spam appliance, which is a separate appliance that attaches to your network and monitors the incoming mail with 15 levels of filtration. There are also some web based filtering appliances that work in a similar way.
The problem with spam software is that it’s limited on how much it can handle, sometimes you have to maintain it on every machine, and you have to keep an eye on it and manually adjust it all the time. Spam appliances like the Barracuda Spam Filters don’t need any maintenance because they update themselves remotely every hour on their own, have a stratospheric threshold on how much is required to overload one (about 99.999% stable), they do the job without clogging your network traffic, and they sit on your network so you don’t have to touch all the end user computers.
We have a fully functional demo that we can show you in your office if you’d like to check it out.
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