Vircom's modus™ anti-spam solutions protect against Snowshoe spam

Online, November 17, 2009 (Newswire.com) - Montreal, Canada - Vircom Inc., a thought leader in the corporate email messaging security, has confirmed today that its anti-spam products modusGate™ and modusMail™ are effectively blocking the most recent wave of spam, Snowshoe.

This new spam trend innovates by using static IP addresses with properly identifying and resolving IP addresses and hostnames, instead of the unresolving dynamic IP ranges generally used by spammers. Furthermore, Snowshoe uses a low amount of traffic on each IP address and spammers create fake companies which look completely legit at first glance. These methods will fool volume-based anti-spam filters and prevent many reputation metrics from operating properly, thus rendering many anti-spam engines ineffective against these spam emails.

"Vircom is a very agile company and leads the pack in threat-turnaround time: our team of support staff and spam analysts detect and solve new threats within hours, if not minutes," said Mike Petsalis, COO of Vircom. "Snowshoe is no exception and is currently being blocked properly by our modus™ anti-spam and anti-virus technology."

The modusGate™ server-side Windows™ gateway software features several layers of detection and protection. With Spamhaus CSS enabled at connection level, modus™ connects to the SBL-XBL which examines and identifies the IP address of the connecting agent either as a Snowshoe compromised IP or not. The Spamhaus CSS is a list of IP addresses known to be issuing Snowshoe spam. If an IP address has stopped sending Snowshoe spam for a specific duration (3 days as of now), it is automatically removed from the database and regular email operations from that origin are permitted again. A whitelisted IP will be flagged by the CSS again as soon as it resumes Snowshoe spam. This form of detection is very effective and provides for a great method of countering the new wave of Snowshoe spam.