Sophos has unveiled the Sophos eXtensible Lists (SXL), an online look-up system that moves away from traditional scheduled updates to a real-time system that provides quicker response to new and emerging spam campaigns.
Rather than requiring the anti-spam engine to rely solely on local data when checking messages for spam, SXL enables real-time access to a wider range of information. It contains current and historical anti-spam intelligence such as IP addresses, URIs, message checksums, image/document fingerprints, etc. If the local anti-spam engine cannot conclusively determine if a message is spam, it can now reference the SXL database (using the DNS protocol) to check for any additional information that might be available from SophosLabs, but not yet downloaded.
A hosted database service, SXL works in conjunction with Sophoss email gateway solutions - Sophos Email Appliances and PureMessage for Exchange and UNIX - to provide the most effective security and control available today.
"Spam continues to put significant strain on corporate networks. Spammers and spam techniques continue to get smarter and in order to guarantee protection, detection methods must follow suit," said Paul Ducklin, Head of Technology for Asia Pacific at Sophos.
"With the addition of SXL, were offering our customers the faster, more comprehensive spam detection they require for effective spam prevention."
Some notable features of SXL include:
- Wider range of spam data - SXL contains information on sender IP addresses, URIs, checksums, image/document fingerprints, etc. Most other anti-spam solutions only offer sender IP information. Therefore, the Sophos solution is far more effective in identifying and isolating spam messages based on a wider array of criteria.
- Smarter server selection process - The first time a Sophos anti-spam engine attempts to contact the SXL database, it queries all locations and automatically chooses the servers that responds first. It then defaults to this location for up to ten minutes. After ten minutes, the systems re-tests all locations to ensure that it always chooses the fastest-responding SXL server, ensuring it has the most up to date protection information. Most competitors rely on random server connections rather than constantly seeking out the fastest responses, which can cause lags in their spam protection.
- Better local database management - SXL provides access to a larger repository of anti-spam intelligence than possible on a system using only locally hosted data. |
