Barracuda Profiles Spammers

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Barracuda Networks, Inc., the leading provider of application security appliances, today announced the Predictive Sender Profiling capabilities of the Barracuda Spam Firewall. These capabilities provide industry-leading protection against spammers’ latest attempts to evade traditional reputation analysis. Utilizing a network of more than 40,000 customer systems worldwide, Barracuda Networks has the most diverse compilation of email available for profiling the behavior of spammers. Using this data enables the Barracuda Spam Firewall to more easily determine a sender’s identity when identity obfuscation techniques are used.

“While 2006 marked the beginning of an assault on image spam, 2007 is marking yet another trend through spammer identity obfuscation,” said Stephen Pao, vice president of product management for Barracuda Networks. “Taking an analogy from the financial industry, where reputation analysis is like a FICO score, identity obfuscation, like identity theft, requires profiling against anomalous behavior.”

“Reputation is a computationally efficient way to profile spam,” said Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research. “However, we have observed that spoofing, botnets, and other means of hiding behind the reputation of another sender have made this technique less effective than it might otherwise be. As a result, while we believe reputation is very important, other spam prevention techniques that profile sender behavior will be very important moving forward.”

Barracuda Networks Inc.