Cloudmark Offers Targeted Security Software for Network Service Providers

Cyberattacks, including phishing attacks and spam, are one of the most costly technology issues facing businesses and network operators today. Messaging security company Cloudmark (News - Alert) helps providers address a range of messaging threats, including sophisticated email spam, malware and Web-based attacks – before they impact subscribers and users.

“Phishing attacks and spam are a huge problem for subscribers and operators alike,” Neil Cook (News - Alert), CTO of Cloudmark, told TMC CEO Rich Tehrani in a recent interview.



“We help them stop that in the networks before it gets to subscribers,” Cook said.

The San Francisco-based company recently rolled out Cloudmark Security for Broadband, a solution designed to stop bad traffic from leaving networks, thus stopping companies from being blacklisted on the Internet, an increasingly pervasive problem for businesses today.

“IP blacklisting is a big problem for those networks. When they are sending out spam to the Internet, their IPs get blacklisted, which means that when their subscribers try to send out emails from their laptops or from their mobile phones, those emails can’t go, and then subscribers have a lot of complaints, and there’s a lot of problems sending emails,” Cook explained. “So we’ve cleaned that up and stopped their networks from getting blacklisted.”

Cloudmark Security for Broadband provides fixed-line, mobile carriers and Web hosting providers with carrier-grade protection against spam and other messaging threats within their broadband networks. With Cloudmark’s software, provider networks can block the delivery of spam and malware from local broadband networks to the Internet, as well as block the delivery of inbound spam and malware from remote Internet sources.

Spam and phishing attacks comprise some of the unseen costs of mobile messaging, which are primarily sent over SMS, which costs subscribers as well as operators, Cook added.

As far as the larger cloud security market goes, Cloudmark has positioned itself as the “little guy,” but with greater ability to drill down into security issues such as IP blacklisting, which Cook said the company’s larger counterparts don’t offer.

“Cloudmark is positioned as a direct vendor of software to operators. We are just a little guy competing against [big competitors]. But we really have software that is much more targeted toward operators than some of the big competitors. They are really much more focused on the enterprise, and we are more focused on communications service providers,” Cook said. “We really understand their networks and how to solve the problems of their networks.”


Edited by Blaise McNamee