Earlier this year, F-Secure made a significant step forward in its company strategy by the addition of a new member to its product range - a piece of hardware called the F-Secure Messaging Security Gateway appliance. So, after 17 years as a software vendor, the case has now been made to incorporate F-Secure's award-winning software into a piece of branded hardware that spells doom for the majority of spam messages.
Spam has become a curse word in the modern world. In offices and private homes all around the globe, people are daily opening their email inboxes and routinely sifting through and deleting literally hundreds of unsolicited spam messages enticing them to buy such products as cheap Viagra. While it is true that spammers continue to flourish because a small but significant proportion of their recipients actually buy their products, the majority of people find the inconvenience and 'in-your-faceness' of this modern affliction annoying if not downright enraging.
Spamming is done for many reasons. Apart from its most obvious commercial applications, it can also be used to seed viruses to create, for instance botnets to bombard a company's servers and shut it down in denial of service attacks. If the rewards of spamming are high, the penalties are also increasingly high. Last year, infamous spammer Jeremy Jaynes was sent to prison for nine years and 21-year-old spam millionare Brad Bournival was successfully sued by AOL - the company he had bombarded - and made to renounce his yellow Hummer and a horde of cash (all of which was later auctioned on the same site where he made his money).
With spam high on the agenda of Internet curses, F-Secure has naturally been interested in creating a powerful and easy-to-use system for fighting it. For this reason, the company collaborated with US company Proofpoint to go about creating a cure. Proofpoint comes with a good pedigree: it is a recognized leader in messaging security solutions that has gained accolades from industry analysts and technology experts for its achievements. Gartner, in particular, classifies Proofpoint as one of the strong visionaries in the market in its latest magic quadrant.
The result is a powerful synergy blending F-Secure's data security know-how and software with Proofpoint's patent-pending Proofpoint MLX machine learning technology. As a result, the new F-Secure Messaging Security Gateway delivers the industry's most complete and effective security for e-mail combining a robust, enterprise-class messaging platform with perimeter security, antispam, antivirus, secure messaging and outbound content security capabilities in an easy-to-deploy, hardened appliance. All in all, the F-Secure solution features far superior antispam technology to anything else on the market with the result that we can boast the highest spam detection rates in the industry.
Spam filtering is not just about removing unsolicited mails and keeping out intrusions, it is also about freeing employees from time spent removing unwanted mails from their business communications and it is also about freeing up valuable bandwidth in company servers. For this reason alone, the new F-Secure Messaging Security Gateway makes sense and its advanced technology clearly represents a competitive advantage for companies that choose it.
Our nearest competitor in this market segment, McAffee for example, uses open source code from SpamAssassin, which they acquired in 2002. Since the source code is still publicly available, it has become the measure against which spammers develop spam assaults to establish how their campaigns get through. F-Secure's technology is proprietary software powered by Proofpoint and thus more secure. The new Gateway appliance also is faster to adapt to new attacks thanks to a rigorous testing of every email that passes through it - more than 200,000 structural and content attributes are examined allowing the Gateway solution to block most spam and automatically adapt to new attacks while reducing the number of false positives.
Lately, F-Secure has had a very productive period lately with the launch of many new products and services in addition to the Gateway server appliance. Notable among these are the corporate solution for protecting a company's mobile phones, mobile solutions for businesses as well as the ISP solution Service Platform for Business, both of which we will touch upon in this issue of Protected. Also in this issue we will take a closer look at the Service Platform for Enterprises as well as service products for our customers. And finally we will touch on F-Secure's expansion in Asia and take a look back on the last six months of this year from the data security lab's perspective.
Author: Mark Woods, Corporate Communicator
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