ePrivacyGroup has released a new anti-spam solution that complements but does not replace anti-spam solutions already in place. SpamSquelcher shapes bandwidth to prioritize those traffic streams that it determines are "less spammy" than others.

by ISP-Planet Staff [February 20, 2003]

ePrivacyGroup is a new company, founded after many of its current group of experts sold their previous company, InfoSec Labs to Rainbow Technologies (NASDAQ: RNBO) in 1999. Rainbow is now a major IT security outfit. Its most recent announced customer win was the European Parliament. Rainbow will provide up to 8,000 users with access to secure information through a portal on the European Parliament website using Rainbow's NetSwift2012 appliance.

ePrivacyGroup is led by Vincent Schiavone, founder of 4Anything, a search engine, and a strategist at InfoSec Labs. Other ePrivacyGroup luminaries include Ray Evrett-Church, the world's first Chief Privacy Officer and counsel and spokesperson for CAUCE; Simson Garfinkel, a trade journalist and consultant; Stephen Cobb, a much-published author and co-founder of InfoSec Labs; and David Brussin, ePrivacyGroup's CTO and also a co-founder of InfoSec Labs.

The organization is dedicated to training and consulting on issues surrounding privacy and spam. Its other commercial product is Postiva, a patented product that protects against identity theft and spoofing and is offered in a coalition with TRUSTe as the TRUSTe Trusted Sender Program.

SpamSquelcher is licensed software offered on an appliance to be dropped into a network. The software uses Bayesian analysis to prioritize legitimate e-mail over spam. The object is not to block spam, and there are therefore no false positives. Instead, the software looks at a traffic stream, and decides whether or not that stream should have bandwidth priority.

The object is to make spam more expensive and annoying to send. If a spammer can send 10 million messages in a few seconds, it is worth doing so, but if it takes several minutes, it may become less worthwhile.

Brussin says, "we expect protected ISPs and enterprises to face fewer spam attacks as spammers stop targeting them and move on to other networks."

He says that end-users see spam as a personal issue, and as a privacy issue. "Primarily, we view spam as a privacy problem because that's how consumers view it. They feel an invasion of privacy."

Pricing and availability
The appliance is priced starting at $19,000, with the full price depending on the size of the network and the number of users. It is available now.

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