Proofpoint toughens up its spam and virus protection!!!

Proofpoint Version 4 Delivers Next-generation Messaging Security to Protect Enterprises from Spam and Viruses, Ensure Privacy of Customer and Employee Data and Guard Against Intellectual Property Leaks.  Product Innovations Include Rapid Response Inbound Protection, Zero-Hour Anti-Virus Protection, Advanced Message Processing and Comprehensive Outbound Content Security Features.

Proofpoint, Inc., the leader in large-enterprise messaging security solutions, have announced the availability of its next-generation messaging security solutions, the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway 4.0 appliance and Proofpoint Protection Server 4.0 software. Proofpoint 4 builds on Proofpoints industry-leading messaging security technology to provide rapid response protection against spam and viruses, enhanced content security features, advanced message processing features and a variety of core platform enhancements. Proofpoint 4 provides the industrys most comprehensive defense against all forms of message-borne threats including spam, viruses, intellectual property leakage and breaches of customer and employee data.
 
The release of Proofpoint 4 supports our continued focus on providing our global customer base, including enterprises in the healthcare, financial services, retail, government and education verticals, with the most comprehensive protection for both inbound and outbound messaging, said Sandra Vaughan, senior vice president of products for Proofpoint. Proofpoint 4 represents a major advance in protecting our customers against viruses, stopping the growing problem of foreign language spam, improving the security and privacy of outbound email and simplifying the administration of complex email environments.

Rapid Response Inbound Message ProtectionProofpoint 4 incorporates a variety of new defences to provide immediate, always up-to-date protection against spam, viruses, directory harvest attacks and other inbound message-borne threats.
 
New Proofpoint Zero-Hour Anti-Virus Module
Available as an optional component of Proofpoint 4, the Proofpoint Zero-Hour Anti-Virus module provides real-time protection against emerging virus attacks. This new module protects enterprises against new forms of malicious code during the critical first hours after new viruses are released, but before traditional anti-virus signatures have been updated.
 
Designed to meet the unique challenges posed by todays rapidly proliferating malcode threats, Proofpoint Zero-Hour Anti-Virus provides a crucial, additional layer of protection that perfectly complements signature-based anti-virus solutions. Proofpoints technology identifies new virus activity and takes preventive action an average of 10 hours before signature-based solutions even begin to respond. Messages and attachments that fit the pattern of a suspected virus are automatically quarantined at the enterprise gateway where they can be held until the availability of a virus signature. Unlike competing solutions, Proofpoint Zero-Hour Anti-Virus accurately detects and quarantines only those messages associated with an emerging virus, without stopping legitimate email.
 
The Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway appliance protects the inboxes of more than 1,300 municipal employees from spam and viruses with amazing accuracy, said Bill Stephens, electronic communications manager for the City of Topeka, Kansas. Were looking forward to the new features of Proofpoint 4 and will be adding the Proofpoint Zero-Hour Anti-Virus module to our existing deployment. Like many organizations, were concerned about the increasing speed with which new viruses and malcode propagate and Proofpoint Zero-Hour Anti-Virus will help ensure that the city is 100% protected from these serious threats.
 
Enhanced Directory Harvest Attack Prevention
New features in Proofpoint 4 provide even greater protection against directory harvest attacks. Proofpoint MLX Dynamic Reputationwhich constantly monitors all connections and terminates or throttles those connections that are found to be centers of malicious activitycan now detect and block directory harvest attacks based on local, real-time recipient verification. Malicious IP addresses are automatically blocked or throttled, conserving bandwidth and resources for valid senders.
 
Anti-Spam Enhancements: Malicious URL Protection, Japanese Language Spam Defence
Proofpoint MLX machine learning technologywhich analyzes more than 200,000 structural and content attributes to confidently and accurately block spamcontinues to be enhanced with new content- and reputation-based spam identification techniques. To further protect end-users from scams, fraud, identity theft and malicious code the Proofpoint Attack Response Centre continually examines large volumes of Internet mail to identify and extract malicious URLs associated with spyware, phishing and pharming sites. This ever-changing list of fraud- and malcode-related sites is automatically incorporated into Proofpoint MLX, ensuring that Proofpoint customers are always protected against the latest threats.

Spam in non-English languages continues to be a growing problem. Proofpoints machine learning technology is uniquely suited to recognizing and filtering spam across many different languages. With full support for double-byte languages, Proofpoint MLX is now continually being trained to identify new forms of Japanese and Chinese language spam. The latest version of the MLX anti-spam engine offers 98% or greater effectiveness against Japanese language spam.

Enhanced Outbound Content Security for Email, HTTP and FTP
This new release also extends Proofpoints outbound content security capabilitieswhich ensure the security of email, HTTP and FTP transmissionswith a variety of enhancements to help enterprises more easily protect private information, defend against leaks of confidential information and comply with data protection regulations.
 
Protecting confidential information and sensitive data from leaving an organization has quickly become a business-critical mission for enterprises of all sizes, and they are starting to understand the need to secure Internet protocols beyond email, said Brian Burke, research manager, security products for IDC. Proofpoint continues to introduce innovative outbound content compliance functionality, showing a strong commitment to this extremely high growth market.
 
Quick Inspection Violation Analysis
In most enterprises, content security policies are managed by a variety of business userssuch as compliance, security, risk management, HR and other line-of-business managerswho own responsibility for compliance and privacy protection. The Proofpoint Regulatory Compliance module has been enhanced with a new quick inspection violation view that makes it easy for these users to more rapidly identify and take action on messages and attachments that are flagged as privacy breaches or policy violations.
 
Enterprise Data Connector for Documentum
Proofpoint Enterprise Data Connector technology allows the Proofpoint Digital Asset Security module to easily integrate with filesystems, databases, content management systems and other applications and automatically index new or modified confidential information. The new Documentum Enterprise Data Connector makes it easy for enterprises that use EMC Documentum applications for secure storage and management of confidential and proprietary content to extend that protection to outbound message streams including email, HTTP and FTPensuring that sensitive content always stays within the enterprise.

Smart Identifier Plug-Ins
A new plug-in architecture allows customers to add their own customized smart identifiers to Proofpoint Regulatory Compliance as needed. Proofpoints smart identifiers offer higher accuracy than simple regular expressions, looking not just for a certain pattern of characters, but also computing checksums or performing other tests to confirm that numerical strings that appear to be violations are truly protected information.
 
Proofpoint 4 allows custom smart identifiers to be created for detecting customer- or location-specific data types such as account numbers, patient numbers, medical record numbers, billing codes, local forms of ID, etc. Like Proofpoints built-in smart identifiers, custom-created identifiers can perform complex, algorithmic processing to ensure high detection accuracy while minimizing false positives.

Advanced MTA and Message Processing Features
Management of MTAs (mail transfer agents) and mail delivery queues can be a significant source of administration overhead for large, global organizations. With Proofpoint 4, the integrated MTA included with the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway appliance is now easier than ever to configure, maintain and customize. New capabilities in Proofpoint 4 provide system and email administrators with extremely granular, GUI-based control over MTA and message processing features via the Proofpoint Messaging Security Console dashboard. This centralized, Web-based administration console now allows administrators to view queues and queue statistics, and easily examine, delete or reprocess messages in queue. Multiple globally distributed servers can be administered from one Web-based console.
 
Rich filtering and search functionality allows for rapid identification of queued messages by recipient, recipient domain, sender and sender domain. Easy-to-configure alerts can be used to automatically inform administrators when queue activity has changed.
 
Proofpoint 4 also offers a variety of advanced mail processing features that can be accessed directly through Proofpoints graphical user interface, including dynamic message routing, masquerading and address rewriting and easily customizable message processing rules.

Core Platform Enhancements
Proofpoint 4 includes a wide variety of platform enhancements that improve performance, reduce administration effort and simplify the management of complex messaging policies. A few of these enhancements include:

• Real-time Directory Queries: Proofpoint 4 adds support for real-time queries of LDAP-compatible directories and Microsoft Active Directory.
• Expanded Group-based Policy Support: Proofpoint 4 provides nearly unlimited options for configuring security and mail routing policies across the enterprise. Policies defined by group are now supported for the entire Proofpoint platform, in both inbound modules and outbound modules. Groups can be automatically imported from an LDAP or Active Directory or created manually in Proofpoints graphical user interface.
• New Supported Operating Systems: Proofpoint Protection Server 4 software now supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 4.0 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES 4.0 operating systems.

Pricing and Availability

Proofpoint Protection Server 4.0 software and Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway 4.0 appliances will be available at the end of February 2006. Appliance pricing starts at $6,750 plus annual user license fees. Proofpoint modules for anti-spam, anti-virus, secure messaging and content security and multi-protocol policy enforcement are priced separately.  The new Proofpoint Zero-Hour Anti-Virus module is available as an optional component of Proofpoint 4. Pricing starts at $2,720 per year, depending upon number of mailboxes protected.