Security and network protection specialist Cloudmark announced the latest release of its Security Platform for Email, a carrier-grade messaging security solution that enables service providers to protect their messaging infrastructure and traffic against evolving spam, phishing and malware attacks.
Security Platform for Email features new enhancements for flexible deployment, simplified policy management, increased message-delivery control and optimized message-handling performance.
Pricing for the Security Platform for Email varies depending on the deployment model, but is priced on a per mailbox or bandwidth throughput yearly subscription basis.
The platform features a flexible policy engine and an integrated reputation system, enabling the solution to identify and block malicious senders and content before networks and subscriber services are affected.
"Email is the most commonly used medium for both business and personal transactional communication, used daily by billions of people," Kevin San Diego, vice president of product management for Cloudmark, told eWEEK. "The ubiquitous nature of email delivery, in addition to its widespread use, makes email and its users ripe targets for spam, phishing and malware attacks."
San Diego explained that while receiving spam content can be a distraction, phishing and malware content is much more insidious, leading to compromises of both business and personal data.
"This data can be used for further, more sophisticated attacks, leading to financial fraud and data theft from business systems," he warned.
The heart of the solution is Cloudmark's message inspection engine, combined with data from the company's Global Threat Network, a repository of global threat intelligence, which delivers sender reputation and message threat data in real time.
Key features and benefits include newly consolidated standard SMTP and SMTP proxy capabilities and an enhanced user interface that enables providers to more quickly and efficiently build and maintain sophisticated workflow policies.
In addition, new message-delivery policy capabilities help increase control of message delivery behavior, adding flexibility in multitenant deployments, while performance optimizations improve Cloudmark Security Platform's connection and message-handling performance capabilities.
The update also features improved monitoring capabilities, including a new REST interface that supports granular data element requests, and a refreshed Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) interface that provides maximum integration flexibility with existing customer monitoring elements.
Finally, cluster-aware, API-based message queue search and manipulation capabilities enable providers to locate messages that match specified search criteria and act upon them directly to alter their routing, set a queue delay period or remove them from the message queue.
Service providers can flexibly deploy the platform with Cloudmark's mail transfer agent (MTA), or with their existing MTA infrastructure to gain control over SMTP traffic and improve their messaging defenses.
"The arms race between email spammers and messaging security companies will continue for the foreseeable future, with well-funded spammers continuing to test for weakness and evolve their tactics in an attempt to continue to deliver their messaging campaigns," San Diego said. "Spammers will expand their efforts to send authenticated email via hacked email accounts at legitimate email service provider networks, as these systems are less likely to be subject to blacklisting."
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