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| Barracuda Networks Unveils Improved Barracuda Spam Firewall Barracuda Networks has announced the availability of its third generation of image spam defense enhancements to the Barracuda Spam Firewall. This release provides even greater protection against the evolving complexity of image spam, rendering these new forms of spam ineffective. Image spam generally embeds text inside of images with the intent of hiding content from the text rules processing layers of spam filters. To combat these forms of image spam, the Barracuda Spam Firewall has been shipping an optical character recognition (OCR) engine since July 2006. In early attempts to foil OCR engines, senders of image spam attempted to use animated GIF files to spread content across multiple frames. In addition, they attempted to obfuscate text inside their images by corrupting the images with lines, speckles and other image artifacts. To neutralize these techniques, Barracuda Networks second-generation OCR engines incorporated both animated GIF analysis and fuzzy logic to stifle text obfuscation techniques. With the third generation of image spam defense, Barracuda Networks has incorporated a new multi-pass OCR engine. This new multi-pass engine performs deeper analysis by performing image pre-processing operations to normalize the images prior to final optical character recognition passes. This additional processing is particularly effective against attempts to hide text by varying color and contrast combinations of text and backgrounds. With these new techniques, Barracuda Networks has maintained a 95 percent accuracy rate in identifying and blocking image spam. In addition to adding processing capabilities inside the Barracuda Spam Firewall, Barracuda Networks has also significantly enhanced the image spam defense capabilities in its backend systems at Barracuda Central, an advanced technology operations center where engineers continually monitor the Internet for trends in spam and virus attacks, and develop strategies to mitigate those threats. Barracuda Central collects image spam samples from its honeypot systems and from more than 40,000 customer systems throughout the world. Once collected, Barracuda Central processes the identified spam images through the multi-pass OCR engine, generates fingerprints for these images and packages them for automatic delivery to Barracuda Spam Firewalls through hourly Energize Updates. By comparing fingerprints of images in subsequent emails against a database of known spam images, the Barracuda Spam Firewall can efficiently and intelligently block image spam analyzed at Barracuda Central. By combining the tremendous image processing power at Barracuda Central with the efficient handling of fingerprints in the Fingerprint Analysis layer of the Barracuda Spam Firewall, customers benefit from latest image processing techniques while minimizing the processing requirements on their Barracuda Spam Firewalls. write your comments about the article :: © 2007 Networking News :: home page |