ROI and Other Cost Benefits of Reputation-Based Services

An organization’s network is the backbone of its very existence and is critical to its day-to-day success. Protecting the network is protecting the organization itself. Today there are even more threats to the network, from all sides and all corners of the globe:
- Email and other messaging protocol attacks including spam, Phishing, directory harvest, and denial of service
- Web-based attacks such as malware-infected URLs, unfiltered SSL encrypted traffic, and viruses
- Network attacks that take advantage of system-level vulnerabilities
- Blended threats that combine multiple attack vectors
New, advanced functionality built into today’s Internet (Web 2.0) has made these types of attacks easier than ever and attacks that were once limited to the messaging layer can now penetrate the enterprise through the Web and network layers as well.
Yesterday’s security technology does not adequately fulfill the needs of the Web 2.0 world. The signature-based approach is no longer effective because threats are evolving and morphing faster than ever. One enterprise by itself often doesn’t have access to enough information to be able to identify and act on threats quickly enough to render them harmless. As a result, modern gateway security must incorporate several characteristics—most importantly, the proactive anticipation of threats, so that they can be caught before they cause damage, not after.
Secure Computing TrustedSource global reputation system bridges the worlds of messaging, Web, and network security, creating an umbrella of multi-platform protection that has long been absent from Internet security. Like a virtual credit agency, TrustedSource assigns a reputation score and further classifies senders as good, bad or suspicious based on an in-depth analysis by processing hundreds of attributes of each sender and each message.
By combining years of industry-leading research with the unmatched capabilities of spam profiling, Secure Computing has made ground-breaking discoveries. TrustedSource analyzes hundreds of billions of messages/transactions per month from Secure Computing’s global enterprise network of sensors located in enterprises and government institutions. Sender reputation scores in TrustedSource are based on sender history, message characteristics and URL characteristics. It assigns reputation to the following entities:
- IP senders
- Messages
- Domains
- URLs
- Images
Secure Computing appliances worldwide report back to TrustedSource, giving it a real-time view of virtually all commercial traffic on the Internet. Any deviations from normal sending patterns are picked up by TrustedSource and reputation scores are dynamically updated. Those reputation scores are immediately available to all appliances in the field leveraging the intelligence of TrustedSource.
Let us revisit the analogy that we mentioned in the abstract; Reputation service on network edge is similar to the peephole on your front door (Figure 1).
Imagine how many couches you would need in your living room if you invited every single person in who knocked at your door or was just passing by. Not deploying a reputation service on the network edge is the networking equivalent. Every single year there is a huge surge in spam emails especially towards the beginning of the holiday season. In 2007, according to Secure Computing Research, spam reached 94% of total email volume. If we go by IDC’s report—“Worldwide Email Usage 2007- 2011 Forecast: Resurgence of Spam Takes Its Toll” that would mean 94% of 10.49 trillion worldwide email messages are spam, a total of 9.86 trillion messages. Let us now look into the details of where and how organizations save money by using reputation based services on the network edge. The default global parameters below are collected from representative samples of thousands of enterprise networks utilizing TrustedSource intelligence in their email infrastructures. You can adjust these parameters and customize them to match your own data.
Are You Really Out of Bandwidth?
Inbound email is doubling in volume every six to eight months for organizations, mostly because of spam. This is forcing IT to add additional bandwidth, mail security gateways and mail servers to their infrastructure. But adding new infrastructure every 6-8 months is not an option for most organizations. The truth is that organizations are actually not running out of bandwidth but spending their resources on messages that can be filtered at the network edge without having to examine the payload at all.