Analysis: Anti-virus players sink teeth into spam 

Leading vendors eye security tool consolidation

“Everybody is using a combination of different techniques. This is the added layer of complexity. It’s all gotten very confusing to the enterprise [customer] to figure out first what is the right partnering approach to ensure that two years from now when consolidation is over, we have a vendor that is still in business,” Grey remarked.

For some customers, however, the AV vendor-centric spam route proved unfulfilling. Jeffrey Deason, project lead in IT for Atlanta-based food vendor Chick-Fil-A, said his organization switched to CipherTrust’s IronMail product after previously running a software AV product featuring spam word and domain delegation options in conjunction with content filtering.

Deason said the AV application did not prove stable or flexible enough to allow his company to base specific rules in accordance with its business model.  After entertaining the notion of outsourcing its e-mail and spam needs, Chick-Fil-A opted to go with CipherTrust’s hardware-based solution for greater in-house control and ease of administration to correct false positives.

“At the gateway level we want to be able to control what type of content can get into our system. We have found with IronMail it’s very flexible for guys to configure rules to allow for things and disallow things,” said Deason. “Our previous solution just didn’t prove as stable because it was an application running on a generic Windows box. It’s the nature of beast.”

Chick-Fil-A features 1,000 business units in 36 states within the United States.  Of those stores, CipherTrust guards 1,600 mailboxes for spam and e-mail protection.

Fighting the war on spam has reached a fever pitch over the last few weeks and months as regulatory efforts to curb and penalize unrelenting spam attacks is a project very much still in the works.

MailFrontier recently unwrapped its Anti-Spam Gateway, which aims to stop spam at the corporate boundary using a combination of spam-blocking techniques. The MailFrontier Anti-Spam Gateway unities blacklists, content filters, peer-to-peer network technology, and dynamic whitelists. Designed to combat the problem of false positives, whitelists are safe lists of trusted partners whose e-mail messages can safely pass through filters, according to Pavni Diwanji, CEO of MailFrontier inPalo Alto, Calif.

"We think these techniques stacked up together maximize the effectiveness of spam blocking," she said.

Meanwhile, San Bruno, Calif.-based IronPort announced a new service dubbed SenderBase, which is designed to establish the credit-worthiness of incoming e-mail messages. Rather than blocking IP addresses one at a time, the SenderBase service lets IT managers do background checks on IP addresses affiliated with spam loads, according to IronPort officials. IT managers can then block unwanted addresses or add accepted IP addresses to a whitelist. The service is offered standalone or as part of the company's IronPort Messaging Gateway.