McAfee Includes Phishing Detection

McAfee SpamKiller is part of the McAfee Secure Content Management solutions group and is designed to deliver secure content management technology that helps businesses optimize resources, increase productivity and reduce their exposure to IT security threats such as phishing attacks. Phishing has become an epidemic that has threatened both enterprise and consumer users worldwide and shows no signs of slowing down. Phishing is the distribution of email messages that have return addresses, links and graphic art that make the emails appear to be from a legitimate source, however involves an effort to obtain private financial information such as passwords and Personal Information Numbers (PINs). As reported by the Anti-Phishing Working Group, an industry association that McAfee recently joined to help fight identity theft and fraud, 176 unique new phishing attacks were reported in January 2004. By June 2004, that number had skyrocketed to a reported 1,422 unique phishing attacks. McAfee has incorporated anti-phishing rules into its monthly rule set engine updates in an effort to protect its customers from this increasing threat. Upon triggering, the rules targeting certain phishing-specific characteristics are assigned a spam score that helps to identify phishing scams at the gateway and aid in overall message blocking. McAfee SpamKiller provides both reactive and proactive spam detection techniques which, when combined with increased incremental updates to the rule sets, offer the most up-to-date protection. McAfee SpamKiller delivers unmatched spam protection and performance with an out-of-box, highly accurate scoring system to determine whether a particular email is spam. With the extensive set of rules that run behind McAfee SpamKiller, each email receives a positive or negative score to determine its overall spam rating, and once spam is detected, messages are either delivered to the end-users inbox, personal junk mail folder or a system-wide junk folder.