TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: BT Busts Zombies and Spammers

BT Busts Zombies and Spammers

Tim Ferguson (bbc@telecom-digest.org)
Thu, 12 Oct 2006 12:59:25 -0500

BT busts zombies and spammers; Who you gonna call?
By Tim Ferguson

BT has launched a new 'spam buster' system which it hopes will clamp
down on junk email within the telco's broadband network.

The Content Forensics system, which was developed by StreamShield
Networks, is designed to combat professional spammers as well as
botnets -- rogue software that infects computers and transforms them
into spam-generating networks.

The 'spam buster' scans and analyses the content of millions of emails
every day to identify potentially problematic messages.

The system spots spam in real-time, as messages are sent through BT's
mail servers, so BT can contact affected customers as soon as the
problematic emails reach their inboxes and help them rectify the
issue.

BT can also track down professional spammers operating within their
network and terminate or blacklist these rogue accounts.

Previously, spam not only hogged network bandwidth and caused an
annoyance -- after becoming infected by botnets, some BT customers were
identified as known sources of spam and thus ended up on industry-wide
blacklists.

The new anti-spam system, which went into action this week, will help
to limit these problems which BT said made business customers
"extremely grateful".

According to Gartner, 80 per cent of email on the internet is spam,
while security software maker Trend Micro estimates that around 6.5
billion separate items are sent per day.

NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the
daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at
http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new
articles daily. And, discuss this and other topics in our forum at
http://telecom-digest.org/forum (or)
http://telecom-digest.org/chat/index.html

For more news and headlines, please go to:
http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/BBC.html

Post Followup Article Use your browser's quoting feature to quote article into reply
Go to Next message: Dan Frommer and Lisa Lerer: "Spam Beginning to Spell Trouble For Wireless Phones"
Go to Previous message: Reuters News Wire: "60 Billion Emails Daily, Mostly Spam / Scam"
TELECOM Digest: Home Page