Antivirus vendor Trend Micro today began rolling out
Network Reputation Services, a portfolio of network-based, anti-spam services
designed to complement the company’s existing anti-spam offerings.
The services represent the first offering spawned from the company’s acquisition last month of Kelkea, an IP filtering and reputation services provider.
Trend Micro acquired the company with plans to use Kelkea technology to
fortify its security technology base.
“We believe there are a lot of growing security threats at the network
level,” John Maddison, senior director of the Kelkea Network Security Services
Group (NSSG), said. “And we are focused on stopping it at the that
level.”
Kelkea IP filtering system identifies the sources of threats and often
prevents them from reaching users by blocking the incoming communications of
offensive IP addresses. Kelkea has a knowledgebase that contains detailed
profiles with statistics and history for more than 1.5 billion IP addresses,
Maddison said.
In addition to protecting the e-mail and network infrastructure from
spam, reputation services can also be used to defend against threats, such
as phishing and pharming, and threats launched by attackers using botnets.
The acquisition and roll out beefs up the Trend Micro already sizable
spam credentials and moves it closer to tackling increasing phishing and
pharming scams.
“Once again, Trend Micro has executed quickly, converting the promise of
an acquisition into flexible market-ready services that address a growing
customer pain,” Eva Chen, CEO of Trend Micro, said. “Trend Micro Network
Reputation Services provide enhanced protection against existing and
emerging threats.
The Cupertino, Calif.-based Trend Micro already provides anti-spam
services with capabilities for some of the largest solution providers in the
world, and it maintains a network for monitoring and rating the reputation of
IP addresses — a process known as reputation services.
“By stopping the bulk of spam at the IP address, our services protect
customers from the rising threat of zombie attacks and botnets, both of
which utilize spam-like techniques. These new services will ultimately help
customers optimize bandwidth and other resources for business-critical
operations,” Chen said.
Dave Rand, Trend Micro chief technologist of Internet Content Security,
said approximately 90 percent of enterprise organizations inbound e-mail is
considered spam. The adoption of spam-like techniques in carrying out
malicious zombie and botnet attacks is creating a pressing need for advanced
network-level protection.
“The services stop between 40 to 80 percent of connections from known
offending IP addresses from sending suspicious e-mail into a network,” he
said.
This service is enabled by the Trend Micro Threat Prevention Network,
which monitors the Internet and rates the “reputation” of IP addresses based
on whether or not they’re sending spam.
Rand said the services will also complement Trend Micro existing Spam
Prevention Solution, as well as other anti-spam content filtering
systems.