Trend Micro Releases New E-Mail Security Tools

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.

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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.

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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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