TrustSphere, a company that provides reputation and messaging intelligence solutions, has released an email security product that leverages a social graph of trusted senders to block spam and reduce the number of messages erroneously sent to junk mail folders, while at the same time helping to defend against targeted attacks.
Dubbed TrustVault, the product maps each email and sender against the graph of trusted users and analyzes the information to ensure proper delivery according to the organization’s policies. Once positively identified as trusted, a sender’s email can always be delivered to intended recipients, even if other systems may have erroneously blocked or quarantined the very same messages, the company explained.
“Socially-based attacks delivered via email are increasingly targeting an organization’s executives and not just rank-and-file employees,” TrustSphere CEO Manish Goel said. “This complicates the task which many of today’s security systems have to perform, forcing them into a trade-off between greater security and ensuring business continuity.”
According to the TrustSphere, TrustVault also uses a proprietary reputation and identity analysis service called TrustCloud before authenticating senders for priority delivery of their messages. TrustCloud serves as a whitelist that validates senders are who they claim to be, and continuously checks their email reputation to protect recipients against spear phishing attacks.
Beyond phishing and spam, the company contends the product can mitigate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against businesses by applying logic to identify email senders that are most important to an enterprise. During a DDoS attack, TrustVault supplies that data to the organization’s gateway security systems, which in turn reserve a pool of connections to ensure delivery of messages from these trusted senders.
“The technology advances in our next-generation solution, TrustVault, will have broader implications to enterprises beyond email integrity,” Goel said. “Through TrustVault we will be extending integrity to all forms of enterprise digital communication, including instant messaging and VoIP. TrustSphere has already begun pilot deployments for the use of TrustVault social graph data for more efficient business intelligence.”
