Next Generation Reputation Services
BorderWare Security Network (BSN)

Traditional reputation systems rely on manual submissions and black-list updates for spam detection. Further to this, traditional reputation systems only have visibility into email traffic, and yet the reality is that email is not the only attack vector used by hackers today. The BorderWare Security Network (BSN) technology goes beyond simple sender reputation to provide an all-encompassing view of the real-time behavior of an IP address by cross-referencing and analyzing data across multiple protocols. For example, the BSN can detect potential spam sources by analyzing security probes against SMTP ports. As BSN detects potentially compromised or infected traffic – based on more than 30 metrics established by BorderWare – individual domain or user behaviors are flagged, graded and rejected, ensuring that legitimate traffic can be sent and received without delay while compromised traffic is rejected.

Analyzing Email, Web, IM & FTP
During session initiation from an external host, BorderWare security devices can check BSN to obtain the reputation of that host and use that information in determining whether the connection should be accepted. The information from BSN may also be used as a part of the BorderWare Intercept engine decision making process to help determine the final disposition of an email message. All of these interactions with BSN happen in real-time, so all BorderWare customers are protected from new attacks within seconds of a threat appearing anywhere in the world.

Stop Legitimate Emails from Being Blocked
Traditional reputation systems, focused primarily on email, simply base their reputation score on the traffic monitored from an IP address. However, many businesses and individuals today utilize service provider or hosted mail systems that share an IP address with many domains. This leads to an incorrect categorization of their reputation and a higher percentage of legitimate emails being blocked. According to traffic monitored by BSN, over 10 percent of the billions of email messages traversing the Internet each day are incorrectly categorized in this manner, resulting in millions of legitimate emails being blocked through this simple reputation.

Domain & User Reputation
BSN includes domain and user reputation, a new patent-pending technology that examines and tracks the content of traffic across domains and users to determine potential risks. The new approach is an evolution of today’s reputation services, elevating threat detection from macro-level IP-only trend analysis to a real-time micro-assessment of content from multiple users and domains – an industry first in reputation services and a critical next step in the fight against threats such as spam, phishing and flooding. 

Global Distributed Network
The BSN consists of more than 8,000 BorderWare customer systems in 65 countries collaborating and proactively gathering detailed data about attacks, supplementing industry standard data, providing information from over half a billion sources. The BSN servers are distributed across three cities in two continents and are built using robust service provider best practices to ensure continuous availability and responsiveness.