Cloudmark

Cloudmark, Inc is a privately held company, San Francisco-based, providing protection against spam, viruses, phishing and spear phishing, threats that affect email and mobile messaging.

The company protects more than one billion subscribers for the world's largest carrier networks and ISPs worldwide, safeguarding 12 percent of email accounts and 20 percent of mobile accounts around the globe.

In addition to its San Francisco headquarters, it has offices in London, Paris and Tokyo and an international salesforce spanning additional countries.

On December 14, 2016, Cloudmark announced shutdown of DesktopOne after December 1, 2017.^[1]

Company Activity

Cloudmark was founded in September 2001 by Vipul Ved Prakash and Jordan Ritter.^[2][3] The company was initially built on Prakash's open source anti-spam solution Vipul's Razor.

Today Cloudmark's clients include more than 100 Tier 1 carriers and ISPs around the globe, including Comcast, GoDaddy, Rackspace, Verizon, Sprint, Cox and Time Warner in the U.S. International accounts include O2, EE Limited and Vodafone in the UK, Swisscom. Idea, RIL, Tata, and Aircel in India, Zain Nigeria in Africa, VimpelCom in Russia. Zain Saudi Arabia and South American carriers VIVO, TIM, OI and Telecom Personal. Cloudmark also provides messaging security solutions for 70,000 enterprises.

Process Overview

Cloudmark claims to be "a comprehensive global sender monitoring and analysis system that delivers timely and accurate reputation on good, bad, and suspect senders." Cloudmark provides an extensive overview of the approach it uses to make various determinations of "reputation" quality. However, Cloudmark does not disclose which specific criteria was applied in its determination of "reputation" quality related to a discrete email sender. Nor does Cloudmark make available a discrete list of email senders which are subject to an adverse reputation determination. Many other providers of reputation assessments do have this facility. As a result, the administrators of a Cloudmark blocked email server have no opportunity to determine whether or not Cloudmark may have unjustly assigned a less than acceptable reputation to the email server.

In process, once an adverse determination is assigned to a sending email server by Cloudmark, the entire stream of email sent from it to a server, which applies Cloudmark's reputation assessment to its email acceptance rules, results in all such email being persistently blocked from delivery. A generic message is delivered back to the sending server each time that a transmission to a Cloudmark designated recipient was refused. The specific reason for the refused delivery is not disclosed. The intended recipient is not notified that all email from a certain mail server is being persistently blocked. Such may indeed have an adverse impact on time sensitive legitimate email messages which are being blocked without notice to the intended recipient.

Cloudmark does provide a link to an on-line form to potentially "reset" [remove the blocking mechanism], subject to Cloudmark's review process and approval. However, it can take up to 48 hours for the block to be removed.

The Company

Cloudmark sits on the board of directors of the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group and the steering committee of the Anti-Phishing Working Group,^[4] It also participates in industry collaborations with the Facebook Threat Exchange and the London Action Plan.

In February 2010, Cloudmark acquired Bizanga Ltd., the developer of a message processing platform.

RSA named Cloudmark one of the Top 10 Security Companies to Watch in 2013.

Long a foe of spammers, in 2015, the company helped the FTC stop an affiliate spam company promoting diet pills, Sale Slash; in 2016, the FTC fined Sale Slash $43 million under the CAN-SPAM Act.

Cloudmark's Director of Engineering Angela Knox was named One of the Top Five Women in Security in 2015, by CBR magazine.

Cloudmark publishes a quarterly threat report from its research team, sharing findings from the Cloudmark Global Threat Network, which encompasses 1 billion email accounts from around the globe.

Product History

When it was founded in 2001, Cloudmark was the first anti-spam solution utilizing a peer to peer collaborative filtering approach. Its initial product was called SpamNet, which was released in 2001.

The anti-spam product name was later changed to DesktopOne. While consumers represented its first market, by 2002, Cloudmark's anti-spam product line had branched out into the enterprise market.

As of 2004, its SpamFighter community had grown to one million contributors.

in 2004, Cloudmark released Cloudmark Authority, an enterprise gateway anti-spam system, and SafetyBar, a consumer facing anti-phishing solution adopted by PayPal to protect consumers in online financial transactions. SafetyBar quickly grew to more than one million users in 150 countries in its first year.

In 2005, the company launched its first products for ISPs.

In 2006, the company launched Cloudmark Authority Anti-Virus, providing zero-hour protection against message-borne viruses. The company's Cloudmark Authority product grew to become the leading carrier-grade messaging security solution, serving 7 out of the top 12 ISPs in North America and 8 out of the top 10 ISPs in Japan. Its solutions were frequently adopted on the basis of superior efficiency, enabling clients to run Cloudmark solutions with 1/10th as many servers as competitors' solutions.

In 2007, the company introduced its first anti-spam product for mobile carriers, Cloudmark Authority for Mobile, along with Cloudmark Authority for SpamAssassin. In the same year, Earthlink selected Cloudmark to protect its 5 million users from spam, bringing the total number of email inboxes Cloudmark protected to 250 million email accounts.

In 2009, Cloudmark turned its attention to protecting social media users; the giant social media network MySpace became a client as did Comcast, which added another 25 million subscribers. Within a year the Cloudmark Global Threat Network grew to top 1 billion user accounts.

After acquiring Bizanga in 2010, in 2011 Cloudmark joined forces with the GSMA, the largest mobile carrier organization in the world. to launch a global spam reporting service, the GSMA SRS, which was used by carriers around the world.

In 2014, the company launched Cloudmark Security Platform for DNS, enabling clients to detect malicious messaging in DNS networks, infrastructure and traffic.

In 2016, as email threats become more targeted, Cloudmark launched an anti-spear phishing solution, Cloudmark Trident, to detect highly targeted attacks, including text only attacks that carry no malicious link or attachment. The product won a CRN Top 100 Security solutions award.

In addition to its solutions, Cloudmark also markets a data feed from its Cloudmark Global Threat Network, which it licenses to a number of vendors, including Symantec. The Cloudmark Global Threat Network encompasses 1 billion endpoints worldwide, making it the single largest commercially available source of global threat intelligence in the marketplace. The network detects more than 50,000 unique, malicious domains daily.

Products

Cloudmark Security Platform for Email

Cloudmark Security Platform is a high-performance, carrier-grade messaging security solution that automatically detects and mitigates all categories of email abuse and threats across a service provider's network. Cloudmark Security Platform delivers a powerful, flexible foundation supporting a variety of content and subscriber-level policy controls.

See also

• Vipul's Razor
• Certified e-mail

References

External links

• Cloudmark website