Cloudmark, a company launched in 2001 by the co-founder of Napster, Jordan Ritter, and Vipul Ved Prakash, the creator of Vipul's Razor, a collaborative spam filtration network, and one of MIT's Top 100 Young Innovators winners in 2003, introduced new fingerprinting technology this week that promises faster detection and blocking of spam and new e-mail viruses for service providers.

The anti-virus fingerprinting technology, called the zero-hour executable fingerprinting algorithm, along with the company's user-based detection model, dispenses with the rules-writing approach used by other detection providers. It disassembles executable code to generate fingerprints that identify new worms and virus stains in real time. The algorithm automates and accelerates the response process by which suspect e-mails are evaluated and reported by a network of participating end-users who collaborate on identifying unwanted messages.

The end-users, or reporters, are ranked by the global Trust Evaluation System and according to Cloudmark deliver 98% accuracy and the fewest false positives. False positives are messages flagged by the system to be spam or other malicious activity when in fact they are legitimate.

"Service providers are having customer satisfaction issues when people get too much spam, but they also get it when people don't get their mail delivered because it is considered spam when it isn't," said Vipul Ved Prakash, founder and chief scientist of Cloudmark.

In February, the Cloudmark network detected and began shutting down the Kama Sutra virus in less than 20 minutes after its first appearance in the Cloudmark network. Getting a fingerprint associated with a threat takes Cloudmark about 20 seconds. Whereas competitors such as Symantec, which acquired competing Brightmail, employ a host of experts to write up to 10,000 rules per day, according to Prakash, Cloudmark saves time by writing none.

"The problem there is the whole latency process as they catch the spam, write the rules then analyze and test those rules," Prakash said. "The whole rules-based way of doing things has become very process intensive."

The company has three products that address anti-spam, anti-phishing and anti-virus solutions. The company's products are currently run in 100 million mailboxes in over 160 countries and process 2 billion messages per day. It has announced Vodafone, Virgin Mobile and several Japanese service providers as customers.

One customer surveyed by Cloudmark determined that up to 92% of the entire e-mail stream was spam and they pointed to companies such as Deutsche Telekom, which Cloudmark said spent almost $80 million Euros for extra storage capacity when 50% of what was stored was spam.

"That's a complete waste," Prakash said.