MySpace using Cloudmark anti-spam for in-network abuse

Last week Twitter user Fausto Cepeda asked Ryan if we could go beyond discussing straight security news and talk about product and technology trends on the blog. It was perfect timing. Cloudmark (disclosure: yes, this is my employer) has announced that they have been providing anti-spam technology for MySpace as part of their in-network anti-abuse system. Aber Whitcomb, MySpace's CTO, had this to say:

“Cloudmark’s technology is another part of our holistic approach to providing users with a safer and more secure online experience. With Cloudmark’s real-time user feedback tool for new attacks, our community joins our fight against misuse of the site"

Here is my long-view take on it: Information security is a practice that involves an evolving adversary. If you apply some solution to one space, say anti-spam to e-mail, the adversary is going to evolve and possibly move on to fresh areas for attack, like social networks. When it comes time to solve the attack issue in the new attack area, you are going to have a far higher success rate if you can apply technology that was built against advanced attackers to a green-field communication channel than if you were going to reinvent the technology from scratch and make the same mistakes twice.

On a personal note, I have invested a great deal of my time at Cloudmark working on this project, so to see it be discussed in public makes me incredibly happy.