Buytaert drops in and
answers questions
from participants in
a class at Mollom’s
Burlington,
Massachusetts,
office.
reliability, scalability,
and availability of
an enterprise-scale
information system.”
SNAPSHOT
MOLLOM
mollom.com
Headquarters:
Antwerp, Belgium
Industry:
Open source software
Employees:
4
Java version used:
Java EE 6
BEYOND PHISHING
Internet spam and
the tactics used by
spammers have
become increas-
ingly sophisticated
since first appearing
on internet bulletin
board systems (BBSs)
in the 1980s. Back
then, spamming was
as simple as repeat-
ing a word or phrase
over and over to
scroll other
users’ text off the screen. By the early
1990s, spam had evolved, and mul-
tiple repeat postings began to flood
Usenet, where the first commercial
spam messages appeared.
Today, most of us know spam as
an abuse of our e-mail inboxes. And
even though only a small percent-
age of people purchase the products
(or fall prey to the scams) advertised
through spam, these e-mail mes-
sages continue to proliferate because
of their extremely low cost. If you
manage a Website, you know how complex
spamming strategies have become. Some
spam messages on blogs and forums are tar-
geted toward readers in an attempt at prod-
uct marketing or phishing (trying to acquire
information such as usernames, passwords,
and credit card details). However, the spam
that Website administrators battle most is
a tactic deployed in an attempt to increase
page rank on search engines such as Google.
JAVA TECH
ABOUT US
grown systems to GlassFish Server Open
Source Edition—the open source version of
Oracle GlassFish Server—to better manage
the demands of keeping some of the world’s
busiest Websites free from spam.
“Java is a great fit for what we do,” Buytaert
says. “Because Java is part of a much larger
technology ecosystem that includes lots of
development tools and open source application servers like GlassFish Server Open Source
Edition, it enables us to create a hosting
service for thousands of customers with the
back-end infrastructure that delivers the
ACCURATE AIM
Mollom’s efficiency
rate at identifying
spam is 99.96
percent.
