Barracuda Spam Firewall Technology

Barracuda Networks multilayered approach to email security provides the most comprehensive protection available, and optimizes the processing of each email to maximize performance and process millions of messages per day. Behind the industry-leading initiatives of Predictive Sender Profiling and Barracuda Real-Time Protection are 12 explicit defense layers including: Denial of Service and Security Protection, Rate Controls, IP Reputation Analysis, Sender Authentication, Recipient Verification, Virus Protection, Policy (user-specified rules), Fingerprint Analysis, Intent Analysis, Image Analysis, Bayesian Analysis, and a Spam Rules Scoring engine.

With this multilayered approach, the Barracuda Spam Firewall provides comprehensive spam blocking for your organization. The algorithms and methods used by the Barracuda Spam Firewall are the most comprehensive and most advanced in the industry.

The methods and techniques used by the Barracuda Spam Firewall are continuously updated via the hourly Barracuda Energize Updates service to stay ahead of spam trends as they emerge.

The Barracuda Spam Firewall provides a number of different parameters that can be adjusted and tuned for your specific environment.

There are two main classes of techniques for blocking unwanted email:

• Connection Management techniques involve dropping incoming mail connections before actually receiving the message. The connection management techniques generally require less processing. For typical small or medium businesses, more than half of the total email volume can be blocked through connection management techniques. Very large Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or even smaller Web hosts while under attack, may observe block rates at connection management layers exceeding 99 percent of all email volume.
  
  

• Mail Scanning techniques involve analysis of messages after they have been received. As spammers become more sophisticated, mail scanning techniques grow in their importance.

Barracuda Real-Time Protection is a set of advanced technologies that enables Barracuda Spam Firewalls to immediately block the latest virus, spyware, and other malware attacks as they emerge. These capabilities provide industry-leading response times to email-borne threats by adding a third layer of antivirus protection to the Barracuda Spam Firewall.

Barracuda Real-Time Protection draws from the largest and most diverse installed base in the industry to detect early trends in email-borne threats. Once Barracuda Central engineers identify a potential virus or malware outbreak based on the frequency, diversity of sources and the metadata about the message itself, Barracuda Central validates the hypothesis by collecting samples of suspect emails from Barracuda Spam Firewalls around the world that elect to participate in data collection.

Immediately upon virus or malware classification, Barracuda Central responds to any Barracuda Spam Firewalls submitting the corresponding fingerprints with an instruction to immediately block the message, stopping the attack in real time and providing the fastest response to email-borne virus threats in the industry.

Further, after identifying new virus and other malware outbreaks, Barracuda Central automatically distributes new spam and virus definitions to all Barracuda Spam Firewalls through Energize Updates. Upon receiving the next Energize Update, the Barracuda Spam Firewall can block the virus or spam variants associated with the new outbreak via the Barracuda Spam Firewall�s traditional antivirus protection layers.