CipherTrust Edge 2.1 Enhancements Provide First Line Of Defence Against e-mail Borne Threats

Published 31st August 2006

Enterprises can block 80 per cent of unwanted messages, such as those containing viruses, before they affect IT resources...

31 August 2006 – CipherTrust, Inc., the leader in messaging security, today announces CipherTrust Edge 2.1, an enhanced version of its network perimeter security appliance. Powered by the Company’s TrustedSource global reputation engine, CipherTrust Edge protects IT resources against dangerous e-mail threats and can effectively reject up to 80 per cent of e-mail connections by identifying them as originating from a malicious source.

Current global e-mail volume is at 50 billion messages per day—expected to rise to 100 billion messages per day by 2008—and CipherTrust Research has found that message volume has increased 25 per cent over the past six months. With the substantial increase in message volume comes a corresponding rise in the threats to corporate e-mail systems, CipherTrust Edge provides an outer layer of security and protects against malicious e-mail threats before they hit any part of an enterprise network. CipherTrust Edge is designed for high performance in large enterprises, and can handle three million connections per hour. Using information from TrustedSource, the appliance allows good senders to connect and send messages, blocks bad senders from establishing a connection, and subjects suspicious senders to traffic shaping, which may include throttling connections.

The enhanced CipherTrust Edge appliance decreases network bandwidth requirements, is interoperable with any mail server or e-mail security product, and provides protection against zombies and virus outbreaks. Major enhancements include the following:

· Improved performance. New and improved memory-based scanning for Message-based and IP reputations enable CipherTrust Edge to better perform under heavy loads and achieve greater results in blocking higher volumes of e-mail traffic.

· Increased connection blocking. The new version incorporates real-time LDAP verification to stop bounce-back messages and immediately drop messages sent to recipients not listed in the directory.

· Perimeter anti-virus protection. CipherTrust has added TrustedSource Message Reputation and memory-based anti-virus scanning as additional spam and malware detection techniques, pushing outbreak protection and anti-virus scanning to the perimeter of the messaging infrastructure.

· Enhanced administration. The simplified user interface features an enhanced dashboard with graphics and information on connections blocked and accepted, as well as a display of “Good,” “Virus” or “Spam” and actions taken on those messages. Trend data is viewable by week, month, three months and one year.

Dr. Paul Judge, chief technology officer at CipherTrust said: “Early success selling our CipherTrust Edge product shows the concept is right on the mark; enterprises want a product that will conserve IT resources by dropping obviously unwanted mail traffic. CipherTrust Edge is the only perimeter security device on the market to include sophisticated traffic shaping functionality to block bad messages. When coupled with a CipherTrust IronMail appliance at the gateway, companies can protect their networks from malicious threats and conserve server processing capacity and bandwidth.”

Numerous enterprises already are realising the benefits of the CipherTrust Edge appliance, including several of the Fortune 500. One customer that implemented the CipherTrust Edge appliance in January 2006 has effectively dropped 80 per cent of incoming traffic at the connection layer. Bandwidth requirements for processing messages have been reduced by 60 per cent due to the decrease in volume. Additionally, this customer has decreased administrative overhead and storage requirements, resulting in significant operational savings. Furthermore, the administration time of managing the customer’s e-mail security has been drastically reduced from 25 hours per week to less than 30 minutes each day, while the burden of processing and quarantining unwanted messages also has significantly decreased.

Availability & Pricing

CipherTrust Edge version 2.1 is available immediately and pricing starts at £10,595.