Abaca Names Spam Specialist, Thomas Richard Lynam as Chief Scientist

SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 15, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Abaca® Technology Corporation, developer of the world's most accurate spam filter, today announced the appointment of Thomas Richard Lynam as chief scientist to extend its leadership as a new breed of cloud protection services.

Renowned American cryptographer, Whitfield Diffie, a principal at advanced technology search firm Herman Collins LLC, aided in the search to fill this position at Abaca.  "This was a perfect fit for Abaca; there aren't very many people who have done their PhDs on spam," said Diffie. "For a century, crypto was at the forefront of information security; now crypto is the best-solved part and new areas like spam control are the hot topics today."

Lynam's expertise extends Abaca's strength in the development of evolving algorithms that will allow the company to stay ahead of the constantly changing email threat landscape.

"Lynam was an integral part in researching fusion methods for combining multiple spam filters, producing a solution that out-performed any other combined filter," said Steve Kirsh, CEO of Abaca. "With his extensive research, education and publications in spam prevention, Lynam is ideally suited to understand the value of Abaca's platform and will be a valuable member of the team in providing our customers with ultimate protection from spam and phishing attacks."

Hear Lynam expose how professional spammers 'game' spam filters by manipulating reputation systems, during The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, M3AAWG, meeting Lightning Session at 2:30 on February 23rd in San Francisco.

Lynam has lectured for more than ten years and authored numerous articles on email protection including: Spam Filter Improvement Through Measurement and Exploitation of Redundant Inverse Term Frequency for Answer Extraction. His journal papers include: Online Supervised Spam Filtering Evaluation and Spam Filtering Using Statistical Data Compression Models. Lynam holds a Doctor of Philosophy (Computer Science), a Masters of Mathematics from the University of Waterloo and an Honours Bachelor of Science (Computer Science) from Lakehead University.

"As my PhD student, Lynam made fundamental contributions to spam filtering and spam filter evaluation, resulting in a dramatic improvement in state of the art spam filter technologies, demonstrated by sound scientific measurement," said G.V. Cormack, Professor at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo. "Lynam's rare combination of ingenuity and mastery of technology make him an ideal choice for Chief Scientist at Abaca."

Additional Co-Authored Works:

Clarke C.L.A., Cormack G.V., Lynam T.R., Terra E.L. and Laszlo M., Question Answering by Passage Selection, in Advances in Open Domain Question Answering, Strzalkowski and Harabagiu (editors), Springer, 2006.

Buttcher S., Clarke C.L.A, Cormack G.V. and Lynam T.R., MultiText Legal Experiments at TREC 2007, Proceedings of TREC 2007: The Sixteenth Text Retrieval Conference, November 2007.

Cormack G.V. and Lynam T.R., Validity and power of t-test for comparing MAP and GMAP, SIGIR 2007, July 2007.

Cormack G.V. and Lynam T.R., Power and bias of subset pooling strategies, SIGIR 2007, July 2007.

Cormack G.V. and Lynam T.R. Statistical Precision of Information Retrieval Evaluation, SIGIR 2006, August 2006.

Lynam T.R. and Cormack G.V. On-line Spam Filter Fusion, SIGIR 2006, August 2006.

Cormack G.V. and Lynam T.R. TREC 2005 Spam Track Overview in Proc. TREC 2005 - the Fourteenth Text REtrieval Conference, Gaithersburg, 2005.

About Abaca Technology Corporation

Abaca is an established best breed email filtering company with a proven, reliable and scalable solution used by MSPs and hosted service providers worldwide including Yahoo! Mail's 300+ million users. As one of the largest email security providers Abaca takes pride in its advanced technology that is less costly to manage while offering high availability and security. Filtering up to 99.997% of all unwanted email, Abaca delivers daily administrative and user reports, offers 24/7 phone and email support, and provides network and power redundancy for continuous uptime. Abaca is available as a cloud-based service, on-premise solution as well as a virtual appliance. For more information, please visit: www.abaca.com

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SOURCE Abaca Technology Corporation