Netgear, Mailshell Offer SMBs Spam Filtering Integration

Networking firm Netgear and anti-spam and anti-phishing company Mailshell have announced an agreement to integrate Mailshell's small-footprint engine for OEMs into Netgear's ProSecure UTM family of appliances marketed to small and medium-size businesses.

Netgear's new ProSecure UTM (unified threat management) appliances feature a version of Mailshell Anti-Spam optimized for use on embedded computing platforms and includes Mailshell LiveFeed, a real-time data service that quantifies traffic reputation via advanced statistical models. Unlike other reputation services that provide only a binary "good" or "bad" rating, LiveFeed provides granular trust ratings with automated adjustment over time as reputations change.

The company said by focusing reputation on mathematical models, rather than simply an "IP black list" approach, LiveFeed provides a more accurate, highly scalable detection for midmarket companies. The SDKs (software development kits) are available on more than 10 operating systems and require as little as 32KB of code on the device.

Mailshell's SDKs are embedded into security, networking and messaging products including software appliances, SAAS (software as a service) platforms, gateway security software, desktop security suites, UTM, mobile devices, wireless access points, firewalls, modems and other low-memory devices.

Jason Leung, Netgear's senior product line manager for SMB security, said Mailshell's detection rates, throughput and optimization for use on embedded computing platforms best fit their requirements of comprehensive security combined with high performance. ""Mailshell's flexible architecture was also a great fit and provided seamless integration into the Netgear platform," he said.

"Netgear understands that SMB customers' limited budgets should not necessitate a trade-off in protection," said Eytan Urbas, Mailshell's vice president of products. "We see significant market opportunity for new, better UTM solutions like ProSecure that make no compromises in protection, performance or price."

The announcement comes on the heels of a survey commissioned by security firm Symantec that found that a surprisingly high number have yet to take even the most basic steps toward protecting their businesses, such as implementing anti-virus or anti-spam software. The results suggested that SMBs understand the importance of security, but a large number of SMBs are neglecting basic safeguards; 42 percent of SMBs do not have an anti-spam solution.