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New Technology to Combat a New Generation of Spam

25X Better Spam Protection with Zero Administrative Overhead.

Founded in 2005 by respected Silicon Valley entrepreneur and philanthropist, Steve Kirsch, Abaca Technology Corporation develops and markets the world's most accurate spam filter.

Spam: A numbers game

Unsolicited email costs millions annually in lost productivity, and also exposes individuals and organizations to dangerous malware. The huge size of the problem stems from the spammers’ business model. The trick to turning a profit in spam, as with traditional bulk mail direct marketing, is to send enough junk mail to compensate for a very low response rate. This numbers game explains why spam currently accounts for some 90% of Internet traffic. 

.In fact, spammers have learned to scale their operations by infecting PCs around the world and linking them into giant zombie armies. These so-called botnets spew out enormous volumes of mail from legitimate email addresses.

The staggering costs and significant risks of spam

The millions of unsolicited emails sent daily create not only a nuisance but also a drag on productivity. According to Nucleus Research, the time and energy associated with sorting and filtering spam costs organizations $712 per employee per year. Security firm McAfee reported that viewing and deleting spam that evades filters, as well as checking for legitimate mail caught in filters, takes up 104 billion user hours per year.
Spam also creates a significant security risk for individuals and organizations. The presence of dangerous malware and crimeware in email has risen to 3.7%. The threat is even larger for government departments and agencies, where users receive 700% more malware in email as spammers attempt to access government networks.
Spammers leapfrog conventional defenses, leaving networks exposed

Most organizations today rely on tools designed to fight the previous generation of spam. These first-generation spam-fighting tools focus on content, an approach that works reasonably well. The trouble with conventional content-based approaches is that profit motivates spammers to constantly outsmart the latest mousetrap. Additionally, users often want to receive legitimate mail that exhibits the characteristics of spam either in the subject line or content.
Other conventional anti-spam methods try to identify spammers. But these rely on individuals reporting mail with bogus content, which introduces subjective human judgment and works too slowly to stay ahead of today’s spammers. Blacklisting organizations have even tried to catch and identify spammers with traps such as “honey pots,” which are simply fake email address with no real person attached. But the spammers are finding ways to sidestep these as well.

A step ahead — Abaca’s next-generation spam protection
Abaca has developed a revolutionary technology that attacks the problem from a different angle—the receiver. The ability of spammers to develop ingenious new ways to mask the content of their messages is only limited by their imaginations, but they will always need people to receive their mail.

Abaca looks at who the spammer sends to and not what is being sent— so it cannot be fooled by content.

Abaca uses a number of laws of spam email—spam must be sent in high volume, spammers must send to people who collectively receive a higher than average share of spam, etc.—to establish reputations for individual receivers based on how much spam they attract. When an email arrives at an Abaca Email Protection Gateway installed in front of a corporate email server or at an ISP, a small portion of the critical header message is stripped and sent to the Abaca® ReceiverNet™ Protection Network. In real-time, ReceiverNet uses an advanced algorithm to compute the odds that the message is spam by leveraging the reputation data of all recipients in the network. Because this “handshake” occurs before the message payload is accepted and delivered, the Abaca system knows if the message is spam even before it arrives.

Abaca ReceiverNet Protection Network Advantage

Key benefits include:

• Unprecedented accuracy. Over 99 percent spam blocking means fewer than one mistake in every 100 messages processed. That’s 10 to 100 times fewer mistakes than any other available systems.
• Instant reaction time. Because ratings are based on the most recent 25 emails for each sender, the system reacts instantly to spam attacks, usually within just a few messages.
• Spammer proof. There are no complicated rules or subjective blacklists that need to be managed. Spam or legitimate email is based on a mathematical relationship that a spammer, who must send in volume, cannot avoid no matter how hard he tries.
• Language and content independent. Focus is on the sending IP-address and who the receivers are, not the message content or file type.
• Highly decisive. Each message is precisely rated with a score that classifies the message as either legitimate or spam. Fewer than 4 percent of incoming emails fall into a grey area where the system has not yet seen enough samples to make a definitive rating. These are appropriately identified and ordered at the top of the quarantine to assist in user determination.
• Immune to human rating errors. Humans are notoriously bad at rating emails. Our system doesn’t rely on human opinion, but only uses each receiver’s aggregate spam percentage in our calculations.
• No training or tuning required. There is no “ramp up” period. There is no ongoing management or tuning required. The system determines the spam percentage of each new user from the ratings established by all existing users. This is done automatically without any tuning or system updates.