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Ferris Research Blog: Commentary on news and trends in the fields of messaging, content control, archiving, compliance, e-discovery, and data leak prevention.
 
 

Why Did Microsoft Buy FrontBridge? So It Could Get More Spam!RSS Feed

Comment on this... (1 comment) Jun 14, 2006
Richi Jennings

Last year Microsoft acquired the hosted (or managed) email security service provider FrontBridge. For some time, we’ve been saying that there’s an interesting competitive advantage enjoyed by FrontBridge and other services providers, such as Postini, MessageLabs, and BlackSpider.

Companies that offer a service to a large number of customers get to see a lot of spam and other unwanted email. This is very useful to spot new types of spam campaigns, and to spot them quickly. As spammers shift to a botnet model, spam campaigns are hitting harder — sending more messages over a shorter period of time. The quicker a spam control solution can notice a new campaign and block it, the less spam users receive.

Microsoft says that "92% of all email received at microsoft.com is spam," so the FrontBridge team is now receiving an enormous corpus of new spam, which should help them to be more reactive to new spam campaigns.

Interestingly, Microsoft claims that it’s also extracting reputation data from spam sent to hotmail.com and msn.com, but as far as we know this is still protected by BrightMail technology.

… Richi Jennings, with thanks to Microsoft’s Andy Lees

[edited for clarity June 15 7.55am PDT]
    1. 1 Security Incite: Analysis on Information Security Trackback on Jun 15th, 2006 at 6:25 am

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