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LiveFeed
Mailshell LiveFeed: Live Real-Time Reputation Data Mailshell LiveFeed: Live Real-Time Reputation Data

LiveFeed is Mailshell's real-time reputation data feed service that combines increased throughput with improved detection rates to deliver more accurate, complete and up-to-date protection. Unlike other "reputation" systems that are simply IP blacklists, LiveFeed quantifies reputations for IPs, domains and URLs, and provides a trust rating and numerical score for each.

Mailshell collects data from around the world, via its network of OEM partners, statistics gathered from LiveReport software modules, data sharing partnerships and our collaborative network of end-users. Mailshell gathers, aggregates, and synthesizes hundreds of millions of data points per day to provide a comprehensive view of new outbreaks and changing reputations. The resulting LiveFeed data is available via near real-time queries to Mailshell's OEM partners, either as a stand-alone service or from within the Mailshell SDK.

LiveFeed's Primary Benefits Over Other 'Reputation' Services Include:

1. More than just IPs: LiveFeed contains IPs, domains, URLs, Sender Fingerprints, Message Fingerprints, and other data types.

2. Fast: LiveFeed queries use DNS via UDP, making them far faster and more lightweight than other services. Standard DNS caching software like DNScache and Bind can be used to further increase performance.

3. Detailed: Unlike other services that provide a binary "good or bad" rating, LiveFeed provides detailed scoring that allows OEMs to map its results to policies. We provide web tools to review and correct ratings.

OEM Partners, Live Mail Traffic Statistics, Data Sharing Partnerships and our Collaborative Network provide data on new outbreaks to Mailshell.

LiveFeed Complements Other Security Solutions

1. Spam / Phishing detection: LiveFeed's primary purpose, it catches ~85% of spam without more 'expensive' filter checks. Compromised servers can be detected and reported.

2. Web security/ Parental control: LiveFeed offers cloud-based data as a service for 60 million URLs.

3. Virus / Spyware detection: LiveFeed's database includes IPs and URLs that are known sources of malware. LiveFeed often contains new data, available in real-time, before other security services have created signatures for those sites.

4. Browser plugin: LiveFeed can warn end-users which sites are dangerous. Because LiveFeed offers granular reputation scoring, you can map LiveFeed scores to different policies and actions (i.e. block, warn user, etc.). Search spam, blog spam or social networking spam often drives users to sites known to LiveFeed as untrustworthy.

5. IM / P2P: LiveFeed can identify URLs, IPs or domains that should not be trusted.

6. Traffic shaping / throttling: Traffic can be slowed, throttled (or prioritized) based on the associated reputation via LiveFeed.

Superior Flexibility

LiveFeed allows customers to query LiveFeed as a stand-alone service independently or within the Mailshell SDK and engine. It is the only solution that allows end customers to customize reputation weighting. Customers can create their own scoring policies, or benchmark the default, aggressive, and conservative settings, and select the detection rate that suites them best.

How LiveFeed Calculates Traffic Reputation: The Ratio of # Spam versus # Legit

Since 2004, Mailshell led with the original industry-wide blueprint for reputation technologies. We track the reputation of attributes such as:

  • Every IP address and domain.
  • Every URL within every message.
  • Every message and/or sender fingerprint.

We also track the reputation of related attributes such as:

  • Country of origin of IP.
  • Domain owner.
  • Name server.
  • Domain Registrar.

We track these traffic attributes in massive databases and apply statistical models to calculate reputation. From a high level, LiveFeed:

  • Tracks the frequency of each attribute in known good traffic versus the frequency in bad traffic or spam.
  • LiveFeed calculates a reputation score, which is a real number, for each attribute.
  • For spam, phishing or fraud, LiveFeed combines the reputation for each attribute into a reputation for each associated email message.

LiveFeed Key Facts

Can be queried as a stand-alone data service or as part of Mailshell's SDK.

  • Increases spam detection by 10-15 percent.
  • Alone catches 85-90 percent of rogue traffic and/or spam, with less than 0.0001 percent false positives.
  • Combats zombies and bots effectively by tracking machines that should not be connecting to public mail servers (home users, DSL and cable modem, etc.).
  • Has the capacity to process more than 20 billion requests per day.
  • Currently has data centers throughout the world in more than 20 countries and on six continents. More info: Mailshell Global Data Network.
  • Includes a network of distributed redundant servers for 99.999% reliability.

 

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