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Trend Micro is looking to make life more difficult for spammers with a new version of its messaging security products and a new hosted service for enterprise customers.
With InterScan Messaging Security Suite and InterScan Messaging Security Appliance, Tokyo-based Trend Micro is offering customers a tougher defense against spam by blocking spam at the network gateway, company officials said.
Spam remains an unwelcome visitor in countless e-mail mailboxes. A recent report by IronPort Systems found that spam volumes doubled between 2005 and 2006.
“Its causing bandwidth issues, [and problems with] storage, [and it can] flood the mail server, so we have optimized our solution to keep those threats off the network,” Christine Drake, a product marketing manager at Trend Micro, said in an interview with eWEEK.
To combat this trend, Trend Micros newest InterScan releases offer IP Profiler—a technique that works to prevent more threats from entering the network with customer-specific reputation services and a firewall that blocks directory harvest attacks and bounced mail attacks.
The tools also include Network Reputation Services, which blocks e-mail from known spam sources, verifies IP addresses of incoming e-mail against those in a database, and works to identify new spam and phishing sources, including zombies and botnets, as they first emerge.
According to the IronPort study, image spam accounts for 33.1 percent of all spam as of mid-February of 2007—the highest it has ever been. To address this, InterScan includes patent-pending technology that allows it to strip out the background, text colors and other randomized elements of an e-mail—boiling the e-mail down to its core so image spam can be detected, Drake said.
The composite engine provides the final level of protection, filtering spam and phishing e-mails at the gateway through a combination of anti-spam technologies, including image spam detection, company officials said.
“Spam has become a major threat to organizations worldwide and traditional solutions are no longer sufficient or cost-effective, Matt Anderson, an analyst at The Radicati Group, said in a statement. “Trend Micro has evolved its anti-spam technology with an integrated, multi-tier approach, including its reputation services, which block spam before it enters the gateway and impacts the network.”
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