As much as 80% of electronic mail is spam

Bratislava, 28th February 2007 – As much as 80% of electronic mail is spam. Besides wasting our time, spam also represents an economic threat to the development of the digital economy. Since an effective solution for fighting spam has not been introduced, individuals and organizations are forced to spend large amounts of money for hardware, software and technical support to manage increasingly complex forms of spam.

At this year’s CeBIT in Hannover, COMDOM Software introduces an innovative and effective solution designed for the requirements of large enterprises and internet service providers. Visit us in hall 6, stand K19 for an introduction to COMDOM Antispam.

Annoying and Costly

Recently, mailboxes have been filling up with more and more spam. In most cases we delete these files and do not further worry. However, if we start receiving 50 or 100 spams a day in our e-mail box, then the issue becomes annoying. Fortunately, most unwanted communications end up in a special folder, and so we only have to click on one button and assume that the problem is over, at least until we receive another one. We rarely realize that spam (beside being annoying) also causes considerable economic damage.

Potential Economic Impact of Spam

Spam is an unsolicited message that will get to you mainly by means of e-mail. In most cases it offers various products – for example pharmaceutics or fake Swiss watches. Buying fake Swiss watches may not have a significant social costs, but spam can have a much more sinister and widespread impact. For example:

• Buying anti-depressive drugs without a medical prescription.
• Counterfit drugs.
• Bank fraud.
• Uncontrolled access to pornography.

People who make a living by spam (so called spammers) acquire e-mail addresses by means of “robots“ searching for these addresses on the Internet (in discussion forums, on sites with mainly illegal contents requiring registration, etc.), or through chain e-mails. Unfortunately there is no way an individual can be completely protected against the “loss“ of their e-mail address. Therefore, the responsibility for fighting spam and its negative impact lies with Internet service providers, telecommunication operators and large companies that manage the flows of electronic communications on the internet.

Cheap Viagra is only a beginning

One of the wide-spread forms is the so called phishing, in case of which a message behaves as an announcement from the bank or another credible institution asking you to enter your personal data, which are then misused in various ways.

In addition to the classical internet spam, a mobile spam boom is already underway in some countries and is likely to expand as mobile devices and computers are increasingly integrated.
Based on surveys by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as much as 80% of e-mails circulating on the internet are estimated to be spam. This causes considerable damage to individuals as well as to companies. Besides clogging networks, spam is a major factor in undermining trust in the Internet, thus slowing the growth of the digital economy.

(Non) availability of a solution

Existing products typically include highly effective Bayesian filters capable of capturing almost 100 % of spam. The biggest weakness in these products however is a lack of speed in learning and filtering spam. Hence, effectively capturing spam becomes a demanding problem in terms of time and hardware. In other words, filtration effectiveness, which is relatively high in case of most products, is not really a decisive feature for an effective solution.

What really matters is speed and hardware demands – the biggest weakness of standard antispam solutions. Faster filtering of spam requires faster and/or more servers, raising the total hardware costs faced by large organizations and internet service providers in managing their networks.

State-of-the-art solution from Slovakia

At this year’s CeBIT in Hannover, COMDOM Software will introduce the first realistically powerful and effective solution for fighting spam. The program is designed primarily for internet service providers, telecommunication operators and large companies who on daily basis process large amounts of e-mails, and thus also spam. COMDOM Antispam offers unmatched reliability and performance to the internet community.

CeBIT’s visitors can learn more details about the new solution in hall 6, stand K19 on 15th March 2007, when the exhibition grounds open their gates, or at COMDOMSOFT.COM.

COMDOM Software

COMDOM Software is ProWeb Consulting’s daughter company developing security solutions for the digital economy – its objectives are to provide innovative and effective solutions for fighting spam, viruses and malware slowing the growth of integrated networks. COMDOM’s developers have significant experience in building high performance network solutions. In the past they cooperated with ESET on the development of the widely used NOD32 platform for Linux mail servers. ProWeb Consulting, a.s. has been also developing and supplying information systems for the Armed Forces of the Slovak Republic.