Intelligent Fingerprinting. Real-Time Detection. Automated Validation.

Intelligent Message Fingerprinting

Advanced fingerprinting algorithms form Cloudmark's core intellectual property, allowing Cloudmark to automatically detect messaging threats. Cloudmark uniquely uses intelligent fingerprints to track threats as they move across the Cloudmark system and to detect spam, phishing and virus mutations before they propagate. As each message comes in, Cloudmark uses these algorithms to generate a unique set of identifiers (fingerprints), which precisely identifies both threats and legitimate messages.

These fingerprinting algorithms are designed to target sophisticated spamming and virus proliferation techniques. Since only relevant threat attributes in messages are fingerprinted, Cloudmark is able to recognize spam, phishing and viruses that have undergone polymorphic mutations, such as changes in text, URL, image, sender or other attributes.

Cloudmark fingerprinting algorithms are extremely lightweight, each optimized to perform only minimal processing on a message. As a result, message throughput is much more rapid and less CPU-intensive than traditional rules- or heuristics-based methods.

Benefits of Cloudmark Fingerprinting

While some vendors use signature techniques somewhat similar to fingerprints, the intelligent design of Cloudmark's fingerprinting algorithms result in higher accuracy, speed of detection and efficiency due to:

• Low probability of cross-class collision where a minimal number of fingerprints is created for each type of mailing campaign
• Resistance to mutation, which allows our solution to find and block polymorphic attacks
• Mutually orthogonal fingerprints, which create a mesh of fingerprints that fills any loopholes in a particular fingerprint that a sender might try to exploit
• Computationally lightweight nature of the fingerprints for faster analysis and transmission

Global Threat Network

Cloudmark's Global Threat Network, the key to Cloudmark's ability to rapidly detect new threats, provides real-time feedback on message fingerprints. The network consists of over 180 million sources, including global service provider abuse teams, systems administrators, honeypots and reporters in 163 countries. Worldwide feedback together with Cloudmark's unique language-agnostic threat analysis enables Cloudmark to stop spam in all languages including those using double-byte characters such as Chinese, Japanese and Cyrillic.

The Cloudmark Service and Trust Evaluation System

All feedback is corroborated and analyzed in real time by Cloudmark's Trust Evaluation System (TES). TES tracks the reputation of each reporting source in the Global Threat Network. Trust is earned over time by consistently reporting correct abuse feedback. This system preserves the integrity of reports and ensures that the system is extremely accurate. By identifying trusted sources within the network, Cloudmark is able to fully automate the data analysis process. Since feedback is continuously corroborated, any inaccuracies in message classification are corrected in near real time. No other system offers this kind of a constant monitoring and feedback review.

TES is a key component of the Cloudmark Service, which performs the backend analysis to determine whether a message is legitimate or a threat, categorizes threats by type and distributes threat intelligence to Cloudmark customers.

Cloudmark Authority

Cloudmark Authority, installed at the service provider messaging environment, is updated every 45 seconds with new threat intelligence from the Cloudmark Service. Cloudmark Authority generates fingerprints for each message and checks them against an in-memory cache of known bad fingerprints to determine whether the message should be blocked. Learn more about Cloudmark Authority.

Cloudmark Research

The Cloudmark Research team consists of leading innovators in messaging anti-abuse. Cloudmark Research has developed and continues to develop fingerprinting algorithms and backend analysis processes to combat the complete range of messaging threats. To ensure the continued effectiveness of the Cloudmark solution against the latest messaging abuse, Cloudmark Research constantly monitors and predicts global messaging abuse trends.

In service provider trials around the world, Cloudmark's approach is proven time and again to have the highest filtration accuracy and the lowest false positives. That's why Cloudmark is the choice of over 60 of the world's top Internet Service Providers.

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