Category Archives for News

Anti-Spam lawsuit filed seeking $1 Billion

The Utah-based Anti-Spam company Unspam Technologies has filed a one billion dollar lawsuit on behalf of over 20,000 internet users. The suit was filed in Virginia under the CAN-SPAM Act and Virginia law.

They are targeting anyone who targets our members with email spam, comment spam, or harvesting. This lawsuit is unique because they believe it is the first major case in the US to bring a claim against spammers for harvesting email addresses.

Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spam-bots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it

For more info visit, http://www.projecthoneypot.org/index.php

MessageLabs upgrades content security services

MessageLabs on Thursday announced upgrades to its content and image control service offerings that feature greater accuracy and can scan more document types for allowable content.

MessageLabs’ Email Content Control 3.0 and Email Image Control 2.0 are offered as managed services that scan inbound and outbound e-mails for inappropriate, confidential or malicious content sent or received by an organization’s employees. The services help companies implement acceptable e-mail use policies and ensure compliance with a range of government and industry regulations, according to company officials.

The upgraded services now feature the ability to scan within Microsoft Office document attachments and include customizable notifications, so that e-mail administrators can change the text within a notification to better fit the organization, they say.

Email Content Control 3.0 also features a reorganized management interface that makes rule details easier to find, and can decompress files for scanning. The service can use the same security policies implemented by a company’s e-mail system, and rules can be set on a user-by-user basis, officials say. Email Image Control 2.0 includes new algorithms for analysing image attributes in order to accurately distinguish inappropriate content, officials say.

“Businesses are increasingly dependent on email as a primary communication tool,” said Michael D. Osterman, President, Osterman Research. “But it presents several risks for controlling confidential and valuable information from leaving the organization. Content filtering — inspecting the content of messages before they are sent — will assume a more important role within messaging management as a means of mitigating risks and managing corporate liability, and to make businesses feel more confident about their email systems.”

consolidation sweeps email security industry

Mergers and acquisitions in the e-mail security space are expected to peak during the next 12 months, as technology players scramble to position themselves in the middle of the big business of message security.

Most recently, Cisco Systems in January announced it has agreed to acquire IronPort Systems, an anti-spam and spyware protection services company, for $830.0 million in cash and stock.

The networking equipment company said the acquisition is a natural extension of its existing security products, which include threat mitigation, confidential communications, management and policy control.

In fact, some observers say the major consolidation in the space is over.

“It’s pretty much done,” said Peter Firstbrook, research director at technology researcher Gartner Inc. However, he speculated CA might be interested in doing a deal. “They don’t have anything is this area,” he said, adding that IBM Corp. might enter the space, too, but has not yet shown any interest.

Gartner projected that mergers and acquisitions in the e-mail security industry will reach their zenith in the next 12 months.

“The more consolidation and the more people using the `good’ software, the better it is for marketers,” Firstbrook said. Firstbrook put together Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Email Security in September, ranking Cisco, MessageLabs, Microsoft, Postini, Secure Computing Corp. and Symantec Corp. in his “leaders quadrant.”

Some of the most attractive acquisition targets, according to some industry watchers, are MessageLabs, MX Logic and Postini.

Mullen, who heads a group called the EMail Experience Council, predicted that the major e-mail security vendors will get very cozy over the next 12 months to solve the security issues, and that in turn will spur further deal activity.

Source: B2B Online

Cisco to acquire IronPort Systems to get into the fast-growing email security market

On 4 January 2007, Cisco announced a definitive agreement to acquire IronPort Systems, a provider of enterprise messaging security products.

The IronPort acquisition will allow Cisco to move into the fast-growing e-mail security market, which is currently valued at approximately $850 million and growing at a rate of approximately 40% annually. The key technology value that Cisco will receive is a strategic foundation on which to begin building a security infrastructure for unified communications, including e-mail.

Gartner Analysis : The consolidation in the e-mail security market is now almost complete. Other vendors will find it difficult to compete with industry leaders Cisco, Microsoft and Symantec in the enterprise market. IBM and (potentially) Juniper Networks are the only other major vendors that have a strategic interest in this market, though BorderWare and Proofpoint remain as respected independent players. Gartner believes the two remaining service providers, MessageLabs and Postini, will likely be acquired by telecom providers in their respective markets.

Extracted from Gartner – IronPort Buy Will Make Cisco a Major E-Mail Security Player

2006 – a good year for making online businesses safe with managed filtering services

2006 has been a good year for the providers of managed filtering services and in many cases web and email filtering services have come together through partnership or acquisition to provide both from a single source.For instance, UK-based web filtering vendor ScanSafe has seen 100 per cent growth in seats served by its web filtering service. It is now selling as much in the US as in Europe, has set up in Asia and now has around 40 partnerships with internet service providers. But perhaps its biggest coup has been to reach a partnership agreement with Postini, a leading provider of email filtering services.

Postini has also expanded rapidly in the last few years, not quite at the rate of growth as spam itself but not far off that. It claims the number one position in the market for hosted email filtering. Expanding its business to include web filtering is an obvious choice for Postini as the email filtering nears saturation (although Postini continues to gain customers from churn in the market). Postini has 100s of ISP partners which could provide a lucrative route to market for its new web-filtering offering.

This has not gone unnoticed by other vendors. McAfee, the world’s largest pure-play IT security company, has itself formed a partnership with Postini and is reselling its managed filtering services. Microsoft made a couple of acquisitions recently—FrontBridge for email filtering and FutureSoft’s Dynacom I-Filter (buying its web filtering product, not the company)—so now has the capability to offer both services.

Two other UK companies, BlackSpider and SurfControl, got together in 2006 to achieve a similar goal. BlackSpider is a competitor to Postini that also provides a managed email filtering service. SurfControl has long been a competitor in the web filtering market. Along with companies such as Secure Computing and WebSense it provides filters for controlling what employees can do on the web. The aim of bringing the two companies together is to leverage one’s web filtering heritage with the other’s experience of providing a managed service.

Not to be left out, yet another UK company with a global presence, MessageLabs, also launched a hosted web filtering service in July 2006, to sit alongside its well established email filtering service. MessageLabs has a partnership with IBM, bringing the world’s number two IT vendor in to play (yes, if you haven’t already heard, HP’s latest quarterly figures allowed it to claim top spot).

Using managed filtering services is proving to be one of the most effective means of controlling web and email traffic.

Source : IT-director.com – 22/12/06 – Written by Quocirca

email content security market growth

Commercialisation of cyber-crime, growing complexity of threats and digitization of information have all served to make anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-spy and other email filtering applications indispensable for today’s organisations. Reflecting this, IT managers and chief technology officers (CTOs) have begun to increase their spending on content security application, thereby ensuring the healthy growth of the North American content security market.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, North American Content Security Market – Investment Analysis and Growth Opportunities, reveals that revenues in this market totalled $2.19 billion in 2005, and can reach $4.28 billion in 2012.

email compliance and policy management – market growth

“We expect compliance and policy management solutions to be protecting 110 million mailboxes worldwide by year end 2006, up 78 percent from 2005,” writes Masha Khmartseva, principal analyst of the Radicati Group, in a recent report. By 2010, the firm expects to see 517 mailboxes protected worldwide.

According to the Radicati report, the worldwide market for compliance and policy management solutions will be “over $505 million by the end of 2006, up 38 percent from 2005.” By 2010, the annual revenues will reach $1.7 billion.


Other Recent Posts:

  1. Surfing porn can still get you fired - 22nd Jan 2010
  2. 10k inappropriate images found on county council computers - 22nd Jan 2010
  3. ISPs now keep your history for 12 months - 8th Apr 2009
  4. Three Irishmen joke turns into 30 BT Staff... - 24th Feb 2009
  5. Media Interest Increases 15% In Employment Disputes - 24th Feb 2009
  6. Email libel costs £110k for University - 26th Aug 2008
  7. Nearly 50% of UK firms fire abusive emailers - 2nd Jun 2008
  8. Email Compliance and the use of Email Filtering - 31st Dec 2007
  9. Email spam - becoming sound practice! - 7th Nov 2007
  10. Email Security (Encryption) 2007 Review - 2nd Oct 2007
  11. Lost emails cause 5m hours of IT Management time - 25th Sep 2007
  12. Turning your email address into a phone call - 6th Sep 2007
  13. links for 2007-08-21 - 21st Aug 2007
  14. Sitemap - 21st Aug 2007
  15. Trend Micro joins the SaaS team for email protection - 14th Aug 2007