MESSAGE FLOODING PREVENTION IN MESSAGING NETWORKS

A message flooding prevention system (1) has multiple interceptors (2, 3, 4), each with an interceptor unit linked with an RCS server, and SMSC, or an MMSC. The interceptors (2, 3, 4) are connected to flood detect nodes (10) for receiving messages at a point in a communications network, extracting data from a message, generating at least one code from extracted data, and comparing the code or codes with one or more previous codes. The flood detect nodes (10) determine according to the comparison if the received message is suspected to be a flooding message and if so, performs code generation including hashing. The flood detect nodes (10) save the code to one of a set of database buckets (21), each bucket being associated with a code, and select a bucket according to the generated code, and increment a fill parameter of the selected bucket.