Analysis: Anti-virus players sink teeth into spam 

Charging into a heavily congested battlefield to help customers shed the escalating burden of spam infestations, AV (anti-virus) vendors are fine-tuning their security offerings to supply organizations with new tools or services to restore e-mail gateway boundary protection to a manageable front.

Trend Micro, the latest AV stalwart aggressively pursuing this goal, introduced its Spam Prevention Service (SPS) this week. The product borrows technology from e-mail security provider Postini’s heuristics rule engine to filter spam by different and configurable category types, notes Jeanie Boots, global product manager for content technology and anti-spam at Cupertino, Calif.-based Trend Micro.

Hot on Trend Micro’s heels, Symantec will introduce its own enterprise anti-spam product later this month. A spokesman for the Internet security company declined to offer further details of the upcoming announcement.

Trend Micro officials plan to utilize its Active Update Server structure to let customers tweak SPS’ heuristic engine with the latest spam attack or patterns updates just as they would for downloading the most current virus signatures.  Eventually, value-added services including real-time spam monitoring, sophisticated quarantining, and policy management could be added as part of SPS’ software subscription service, Boots added.

Trend Micro’s SPS offering shipping this week supports Sun Solaris servers. The security vendor plans to offer SPS for Microsoft Windows NT in May, followed by a Linux version by June.

Despite getting the earliest jump on its AV brethren by acquiring anti-spam maker Deersoft at the start of 2003, Network Associates may have the toughest road ahead to enable coordinated spam protection at the network gateway, server, and desktop level.

The AV and content security behemoth may be faced with extensive engineering to enable the desktop-oriented Deersoft SpamAssassin to be enterprise-ready and co-exist with McAfee and Network Associates technology, said Maurene Grey, research director at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner.

According to the Gartner analyst, customers are flocking toward anti-spam products to re-acquire strong operational efficiency and implement a “security guard” at the e-mail environment boundary to simultaneously oversee spam protection, virus protection, and content filtering chores – a trend that AV vendors have likewise targeted.

“The [market] consolidation is being carried out by the leading players in the space of e-mail boundary protection and that gets us to Trend Micro, Symantec, and NAI,” said Grey. “They’re already well known and already have a stake. This provides [customers with] licenses bundling and benefits to the enterprise.”

Spam concerns traditionally range from loss of user productivity and rising infrastructure costs to legitimate threats of lawsuits and hostile work environments due to oftentimes inappropriate content. The problem is forecasted to only get worse. Gartner predicts that in 2004, 50 percent of all e-mail will be spam-related.

Exacerbating the problem, competition for customers’ affections is fierce.  Organizations must decide if they want to entrust their spam protection to a services model offered by Postini and MessageLabs, a licensed software approach from vendors such as honey pot-probe network based BrightMail as well as SurfControl, or a hardware “box” perspective from CipherTrust.