Cisco plans to incorporate spam filtering into routers.

Cisco purchase IronPort to acquire "reputation filter" technology.

[grelmar]

At first glance, I just thought Cisco was buying into the Antivirus Software wars (a dubious move, given the increasingly fragmented market). But then I actually, you know, read the article and a few quotes jumped out...

From Reuters [today.reuters.com]:

IronPort is known for "reputation filters" that block spam by examining a sender's record. Blocking spam can help a company save bandwidth...

Cisco senior Veep Richard Palmer adds:

"We can use that information at Cisco for the routers and switches and firewalls to filter traffic."

Now, is it just me, or is anyone else worried that once the hardware gets out, ISP's are gonna use it to further throttle traffic from "bad neighborhoods"?

[bill]

I had read some reviews of the IronPort system and it sounded as though they were surprisingly effective in their method of detecting spam. It was a bit more complex than using a list of open proxies to detect spam...but now I can't find the article to provide more details. :(

[grelmar]

You know, I would really enjoy seeing that article.

Cisco's hardware is incredibly "core" to much of the backbone of the net. If their hardware is to incorporate spam filtering, then it has tremendous Sword of Damocles [en.wikipedia.org] potential on many fronts.

Powerful content filtering implemented on highly influential, core technology... Seems to me, the impact could be orders of magnitude stronger than merely getting banned by Google or other top tier search engines.

I dunno. To be honest, I find the potential implications to deep to think about in a vacuum. I don't want my mind spinning off in the wrong direction.

[bill]

Found it! :)
At least one of them...

This is an article pushing the Deep Six Technologies Spamwall, but they use IronPort as a comparison, and it was the only appliance to score perfectly on their spam filtering tests.

Connection scoring beats spam filtering [windowssecrets.com]

[grelmar]

Interesting read.

From the other article I read, it sounds like the IronPort system is similar to the DS2000, basing much of it's decisions on IP filtering, and I believe IronPort is also using some kind of decision tree. (not sure though).

I just find the whole technology interesting. Right now, it's being used for eliminating Spam. But if it proves effective, I have little doubt that it will be used for other types of filtering.

Think ISP level filtering of phishing sites and other gray and black sites. It would be very easy to do.

[bill]

Just like filtering spam, the filter is only good if it can provide the user with 0% false positives. If they're able to reliably block junk mail and unwanted site and not classify anything legitimate as spam then it's a worthwhile tool. From the sounds of it this sort of technology is ready...it's just not cheap.