Sophos Genotype Technology

Sender Genotype Technology

Anti-spam protection for the botnet age

Sender Genotype technology takes spam detection to the next level, much like reputation filtering did several years ago. This new technology watches for tell-tale botnet behavior at the connection level, preventing spammers from sending email even before their reputation has been established.

Sender Genotype detection overcomes this weakness of reputation filtering to block even more spam at the connection level, reducing the load on the scanning engine and increasing the throughput, capacity and longevity of Sophos Email Security and Control solutions.

90% of spam is sent from botnets

Experts agree that up to 90% of spam originates from botnets - armies of hijacked, remotely controlled computers sending messages to unsuspecting inboxes. Why are traditional defenses ineffective?

• Spam campaigns are simpler. Many campaigns provide nothing more than a subject line and a web link, relying on the reader to click through to a web page in order to get the full message.
• Botnet spam is fast-moving. Hijacked computers come online for minutes at a time, sending highly targeted messages and then going offline.
• Botnets are hard to detect. With millions of new computers being recruited, many with dynamically assigned IP addresses or free domains (e.g. ISPs, Gmail, Yahoo!, etc.), most 'senders' have never been seen before. This renders reputation filtering largely ineffective, and places greater burden on the scanning engine to detect spam. With today’s rising volume of email, this runs the risk of introducing undesirable bottlenecks into the email infrastructure.