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Thomas Mangin edited this page Mar 14, 2015 · 1 revision

How is the software designed ?

A Modular Approach

In order to process a high volume of data, ScavengerEXA is built as a modular solution adaptable to many different network topologies.

The complete solution comprises a number of discrete applications, from which users will be able to cherry pick components fulfilling their needs.

The message flow diagram shows the different parts of ScavengerEXA and how they communicate together.

Possible Deployment Topology

ScavengerEXA can be deployed in- or out-of-band to suit the volume of traffic you have and the resources you have available to monitor it

Overview of each application

A capture program

scavenger-capture is designed to gather copies of mails sent by an ISP customer transparently. No mail content is gathered, only the technical conversation including the sender, recipients and if the transactions are successful or not. The captured flows can be sent to one or multiple backends.

A load dispatching daemon

scavenger-dispatch is a network topology aware program whose goal is to take the captured information and dispatch it to one or many daemons which will perform the analysis of the information in order to detect spam patterns, then relay the result to the appropriate ISPs' equipment for action.

A decision making server

scavenger-policy is a policy application in charge of discovering the infected machines.

Postfix users will be glad to hear that our server can as well be used for normal inbound mail filtering.

The program has been designed to allow the community to contribute extensions in order to improve its efficiency and allows users to select what they know will work best in their networks.

A way to trap the SPAM

scavenger-mta, our dummy mail server can be used to wallgarden a suspected machine until more information can be gathered or the machine infected is cleaned up.

An Email Notifier

scavenger-action-mail is a program sending an email to a nominated postmaster when some spam is detected.

A wallgarding Program

scavenger-action-netfilter can be used to automatically configure a linux machine firewall to transparently proxy a detected spammer to a running instance of the dummy MTA.