Shutting the door on spam

Content-management firms like MX Logic keep junk e-mail at bay

Joyzelle Davis, Rocky Mountain News

Published February 13, 2006 at midnight

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Inside a glassed-walled command center, eight employees sit with their eyes trained on computer monitors as a large screen above their heads serves as a sort of scoreboard for the war on unwanted and malevolent e-mail.

Of 21 million messages, 14 million were spam. And that's just in the past 24 hours.

MX Logic's Threat Center scans all of the ingoing and outbound Web traffic and e-mail for its 6,900 clients before the messages ever hit the customers' network and consume precious bandwidth.

MX Logic is part of the burgeoning secure content-management industry, which IDC estimates will grow to $6.7 billion by 2007 as companies decide that they can't rely on desktop anti-virus programs and overworked IT staff alone to keep pernicious worms, spyware and junk e-mail at bay.

"As more and more companies look to the Internet as a critical commercial tool, they realize that they can't ignore the need to keep it secure," said Scott Chasin, Douglas County-based MX Logic's chief technology officer, who likens the service to providing "a gated community."

Spam, viruses and related e-mail threats can be both an operating expense and an insidious productivity drain for employers. The annual cost of network maintenance, additional services and other information technology resources needed to counter unwanted e-mail costs about $200 per mailbox, according to Ferris Research.

"It has made a huge difference on our support staff," said Scott Bell, executive director of infrastructure for the Jefferson County School District. "We're no longer running around like chickens with our heads cut off."

The district signed up with MX Logic in mid-2003 after getting just "slammed" with spam - as many as 200 a day for some users - after the Sobig worm crippled the network for a week, he said. The school system, which has about 8,500 mailboxes, has saved an estimated $3.2 million each year in employee time now that the spam has been largely eliminated, Bell said.

Closely held MX Logic, which doesn't disclose its revenue, has more than 6,900 clients, including The Sports Authority, Hyundai Motor America and Verio Inc. Prices vary according to what package the customer selects but start at around $1 per user per month.

MX Logic isn't the first managed-service provider, and its rivals include London-based MessageLabs and California-based Postini and FrontBridge Technologies, which Microsoft purchased last year. Some of its potential rivals are in fact partners, such as Symantec's BrightMail system, which is part of MX Logic's filter.

Chasin co-founded MX Logic in 2002 with Chairman and Chief Executive John Street, who were already veterans of the e-mail industry. They previously founded Colorado Springs-based USA.net, the first Web-based e-mail service and provider of outsourced messaging services for large companies such as American Express and United Airlines.

Now, they and the 130 employees at MX Logic have viruses - figuratively - on the brain, even naming each of their conference rooms after notorious outbreaks such as the "Netsky" worm of 2004 and the "Melissa" bug of 1999. The e-mail threats are constantly evolving, these days designed by organized criminal groups with financial motives instead of teenagers flaunting their intelligence, Chasin said.

"It's a cat-and-mouse game," he said. "They up the ante, and we beef up our filters."

Once clients sign up with MX Logic, they redirect all of their e-mail to be received off-site by MX Logic.

When an e-mail hits MX Logic's filter, it's scanned through 20 filtering techniques to determine whether it is legitimate, such as: What percentage of spam has come through that IP address in the past? What's the statistical probability that the message is spam based on how often certain words appeared in other known spam? Is there a Sender ID record?

MX Logic keeps a record of quarantined e-mails so that clients can weed out any messages that were accidentally marked as junk. Not all spam e-mail is Viagra pitches; a portion of it comes from newsletters that people long ago agreed to receive.

"People are very lazy about unsubscribing from mail they don't want," said Sam Masiello, head of MX Logic's threat center.

Investors, including Adams Street Partners, Boulder-based Vista Ventures and River Cities Capital Funds, have poured $26 million into MX Logic. Some of that money is going toward expanding into new areas of security management, like the emerging technology of Internet-based phone service.

"I spend a lot of my time thinking about what the bad guys are going to do next," Chasin said.

By the numbers

17,000

Number of viruses or variants discovered in 2005

• Percentage of spam e-mail through MX Logic's threat center:

2005: 68 percent

2004: 77 percent

• One in 38 e-mails was infected with a virus or worm.

• At the height of the W32/Sober.Z virus last year, one in eight e-mails was infected.

davisj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2514

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