Explosion Of Text-Msg Spam Creates Space For Cloudmark Spam is still a nuisance, but controlling unwanted email messages represents one of the few success stories in the security industry these days. A more sophisticated form of that threat has been gaining ground on mobile phones, however. The amount of spam sent by text messages has more than tripled from last year’s level to 45 million messages sent each day. About 92% of those are messages are trying to trick people into giving up money. Compare that with email spam, which is mostly made up of schemes to direct people to a website full of advertising links, according to research from Cloudmark, a company that’s built a strong business in preventing email spam and is rapidly expanding into the mobile opportunity. “We’re much further along in the threat landscape in mobile than I [previously] thought,†said Mary Landesman, who recently joined Cloudmark from Cisco Systems to lead its research team. “We need not let it become the problem we had with Internet threats, with email worms, with spam.†Cloudmark made its name in the latter half of the last decade by selling a messaging security service to major carriers to help them keep the spam off their networks. Today it claims to process 60% of all email traffic and has every major Internet service provider in North America as a customer. It also processes half of all the traffic on social networks. Mobile is now becoming the biggest growth opportunity for the company, with more than half of its new business last year coming from mobile carriers, said Jacinta Tobin, the company’s chief marketing officer. Cloudmark’s annual revenue grew 30% last year and is between $40 million and $100 million, she said. The company was founded towards the end of the dot-com bubble to sell desktop messaging security but shifted its focus to the carriers in 2004. Around that time, spam was a security concern, but carriers really started paying attention when spam became financially motivated and jumped in volume to account for over 95% of all Internet traffic, Tobin said. (The current level is around 74%.) Now spam sent through text messages has the potential to be more dangerous, in part because the people behind it have learned how to avoid detection, and in part because people tend to be more trusting of messages sent through text then they ever were of email spam, the company said. “It’s at a level of sophistication now that attackers took a decade to reach on the PC,†Landesman said. Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital...tes-space-for-cloudmark/?mod=google_news_blog
