Symantec’s push into the red-hot spam-fighting market
got another boost this week with its $28 million acquisition of TurnTide, a
company known for its spam-routing technology.
The deal comes less than two months after Symantec
shelled out $370 million
to acquire anti-spam and anti-virus specialist Brightmail
to enhance its enterprise product line-up.
TurnTide, which was known as SpamSquelcher before it was spun off by the
ePrivacyGroup, markets an
Anti-Spam Router (TurnTide ASR) that takes an unusual approach to fighting
the scourge of unsolicited mail. Instead of filtering junk mail, TurnTide
targets message paths instead of individual messages to slow traffic flows
that seem suspicious.
Anti-spam experts hail TurnTide’s ASR as the “only device that
really reduces spam.”
Stephen Cobb, a security consultant who was heavily
involved in the creation of SpamSquelcher under the ePrivacyGroup umbrella,
believes it is a “very smart” acquisition by Symantec, because of the unique
approach of slowing spam delivery instead of using filtering techniques.
“Since the same technology has applications beyond spam, as in the
control of outbound e-mail at the
network layer, I think this acquisition is a very smart move by Symantec and
a good fit with their earlier acquisition of Brightmail,” Cobb said in an
interview with internetnews.com.
Symantec has not yet officially announced the acquisition, which became
public when TurnTide posted a note on its
Web site. A company spokesman confirmed the all-cash deal, which has no
pending regulatory or shareholder requirements.
“We intend to offer TurnTide as a standalone solution on Symantec
hardware and, in future, we plan to integrate it with our gateway
security solutions,” the spokesman added.
With the TurnTide acquisition, Symantec could potentially integrate the
anti-spam routing features in Brightmail’s corporate offerings to save
heavily on bandwidth and server capacity. Symantec could also put TurnTide
into the security appliances that handle the monitoring of inbound and
outbound traffic.
Earlier this week, the company released the Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam
Version 6.0, an enterprise-focused upgrade that adds a centralized Web-based
control center, consolidated logging and reporting, and global policies that
can be created on a per-user or per-group basis.
The new version also adds non-English-language filtering to handle spam
from different countries and attachment signature technology to create
filters based on a specific MIME attachment. These attachment signatures
protect organizations from spam with commonly appearing attachments.
