April 28, 2007
Doctor Web, a leading security software developer of Russia, held a scientific conference on anti-spam technologies in Kiev (Ukraine), together with its French partner company - Goto Software of Lille. The event, supported by National Technical University of Ukraine, gathered around 200 participants from Ukrainian state organizations, major banks and private enterprises of Ukraine, leading national universities.
The Russian company presented its newly released anti-spam solutions based on Vade Retro technology developed by Goto SoftWare.
Opening the conference, Boris Sharov, CEO of Doctor Web, Ltd. outlined the main advantages of Vade Retro anti-spam, which stood for selection of this technology for Dr.Web anti-spam solutions: high efficiency and reliability of methods used for spam filtering, compactness of the main technological module, ability to provide a high level of spam detection from the first minutes of running in the system, no matter a server or a workstation.
Adrian Barbu, technical director of the company "Goto Software", spoke in detail about peculiarities of today's antispam-tehnologies and shared some tricks used to fight spam by Vade Retro developers.
Vade Retro spam filters do not require any initial training and are ready to be used immediately after their installation, unlike Bayesian filter-based antispam solutions. A unique heuristic engine - the core of Vade Retro technology - greatly enhances spam filtering capabilities and makes them language independent. Describing existing antispam-tehnologies, Adrian Barbu showed their weaknesses and advantages of the heuristic approach.
A significant feature of Vade Retro, according to Mr.Barbu, is its resistance to methods used by "spammers" to circumvent existing spam-filters, especially those existing in open source. Ironically, attempts to "cheat" on existing spam-filters become "a litmus test", which refers unmistakably to a spammer nature of mail messages. Bypassing open source filters, which are, certainly, most used worldwide, does not help spammers to get through Vade Retro filters.
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Mr.Barbu's presentation aroused great interest of the audience who rushed to ask questions on many aspects of anti-spam problematic. No wonder that cyrillic language spam detection was one of the major points of interest. Mr.Barbu stressed that the "nationality" of spam mails is of little interest to the heuristic engine, which analyzes hundreds of points in the mail message never looking into its content. Therefore, the spam filter detects spam equally well in English or Spanish, Japanese, Arabic or Russian. Improving rules of the heuristic requires a painstaking daily work in the spam-analysis laboratory of Goto Software, screening waves of spam all over the world.
