BT first to tackle spam at source

By Stuart Corner
Saturday, 14 October 2006 09:23

Technology

BT is implementing what it says is world’s first fully-automated ‘spam buster’ system designed to detect and block professional spammers and ‘botnet’-infected customers using the BT broadband network.
 
BT is using Content Forensics from StreamShield Networks to scan the millions of e-mails traversing its network every day. This, according to BT provides it with a detailed reports on the location and size of spam-related problems in its BT network.

BT says its security team will then take immediate action against professional spam operators, which could include terminating rogue accounts and adding offending IP addresses to independently maintained black-lists which are used by many ISPs to identify and block 'spam' (However it is not uncommon for 'clean' IP addresses to be added to these black-lists causing considerable inconvenience to the users of those IP addresses).

StreamShield launched Content Forensics in May saying that, prior to its introduction, "service providers have had to rely on crude tools that look for anomalous IP traffic patterns to identify infected users."

The company claims that Content Forensics "can transparently analyse the content of all emails on the network including those that do not originate from the service provider’s own email systems to automatically identify bulk spammers [and] is able to do this at the speeds and email volumes found in service provider networks with its revolutionary, silicon-based StreamScan technology used in the StreamShield CSG-3100 content security gateway." BT is the first announced customer for the product.