Akamai Takes Half The Internet Offline... Again
Canaries In A Data Mine

Filtering Company Insults You To Get Your Business

Overhype

from the yeah,-right... dept

Tue, Jun 15th 2004 12:32pm — Mike Masnick
What is it about filtering companies that they feel the need to put out studies hyping up a problem as if it's the end of the world and (of course) mentioning that they have a solution to that problem. The latest in a long line of such studies is one from SurfControl, trying to worry businesses all over about the fact that (gasp!) much of their business info is in electronic form and that means (no, really!) it might get emailed to the wrong person. They then go on to basically insult any business that thinks they don't need their software to protect such accidents: "Alarm bells should be ringing but I'm not sure they are.... The business community is very naive and tends to think that security means just dealing with viruses." Maybe they just think there are better ways to handle such issues than to shell out cash to a filtering company.
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  • identicon
    NOBODY, 15 Jun 2004 @ 2:48pm

    No Subject Given

    Hey, I could solve that problem. for a nominal fee of a few hundred thousand dollars, I will personally print out every document, and deliver it to the right person! Hah! Ha! That's enterprising for you!

    [ link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Nonesuch, 15 Jun 2004 @ 9:38pm

    Delivered to the wrong person?

    I've seen these email filters in action, and they are all but worthless. Basically, you stick in your senior executives salaries and other interesting values into a special filter rule, the server quarantines anything that matches, and some poor executive assistant has to go through and release the 99.9% false positives that end up being delayed...

    I've never received an email at work that was intended for somebody else (I have a rather uncommon surname), but I have received a number of faxes intended for a large stock brokerage.

    Turns out that the first number of the area code was off by one.

    [ link to this | view in chronology ]


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