Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam v6.0 delivers next-generation spam-fighting power, control to enterprises

Symantec Corp, the global leader in information security, today announced Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam Version 6.0. The new solution is designed to further protect enterprises from the latest spamming techniques by providing new non-English language filters and powerful administration enhancements.

Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam 6.0 also now includes a centralised Web-based control centre, consolidated logging and reporting, and global policies that can be created on a per-user or per-group basis.

"Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam 6.0 demonstrates Symantec's commitment to providing its customers with the most innovative and technically proficient anti-spam solution on the market," said Enrique Salem, senior vice-president, gateway solutions, Symantec Corp. "With version 6.0, we have raised the bar on anti-spam technology and dramatically improved the power of our industry-leading effectiveness and accuracy, while giving our customers more control over their spam protection."

"While improving spam defences is critical, another area of great importance to end-user organisations is creating operational efficiencies for spam defences," said Matt Cain, senior vice-president, META Group, a leading provider of information technology research, advisory services and strategic consulting. "Aspects such as single console management, fast and accurate reporting and troubleshooting via rolled up multi-node logs, and granular and bulk policy creation, are essential in improving spam defences while lowering the administrative overhead."

Symantec estimates between 10% and 20% of all global spam is non-English, making non-English spam a critical issue for any company, especially in countries where English is not the primary language. Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam 6.0 can identify messages in any of 11 languages (Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish), enabling the software to run only the filters that apply to the message's language, increasing the performance of Symantec's foreign language filtering capabilities. End-users also have the ability to define the languages in which they want to receive and/or block messages. Symantec has also added language-specific heuristics that analyse messages for language-specific characteristics of spam, which further improves effectiveness.

In addition to Symantec's non-English language filtering, the Symantec Brightmail Probe Network attracts spam from 20 different countries around the world and Symantec Brightmail Logistics and Operations Centres (BLOC) offer native language capabilities in San Francisco, Dublin, Sydney and Taipei.

"Symantec is certainly proud of the fact that in such a short period of time we have been able to develop extended functionality on this product, to ensure our customers around the world are able to take advantage of this release," says Patrick Evans, regional manager at Symantec Africa. "The increase of spam worldwide has certainly placed pressure on organisations in terms of employee productivity and virus infections. Therefore, with the release of Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam 6.0 companies now have the opportunity to gain control and increase their security - all in one."

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The attachment signature technology included in Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam 6.0 enables the company to create filters based on a specific MIME attachment (for example, a specific pornographic image file) seen in the Probe Network. These attachment signatures protect organisations from spam with commonly appearing attachments.

The third-generation URL filters included in Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam 6.0 identify spam both based on Web URLs and also using "mailto" URLs to prevent end-user replies to spammers via e-mail. This third-generation technology can detect even more types of URL masking techniques. The URL filters are developed based on URLs seen in the Symantec Brightmail Probe Network, a collection of millions of decoy accounts that are seeded across the Internet to attract spam.

Additionally, Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam 6.0 gives administrators the ability to set its anti-spam systems in compliance with differing company-wide, internal and overall legal requirements on the blocking, disposal and investigation of spam. For example, a default setting for the whole company might be that all spam is deleted and all suspected spam is quarantined. However, in organisations where all e-mail must be stored for a period of time, a group of users or one individual in the legal department can be allocated a different setting (for example, "Quarantine all spam and suspected spam").

For large organisations that require multiple Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam servers, the new centralised management capabilities allow administrators to view and generate consolidated logs and reports for all Symantec servers in the network.

Symantec completed the acquisition of Brightmail on 21 June 2004.

Brightmail's market-leading anti-spam technology will be a key complement to Symantec's broad array of gateway security solutions. For more information regarding Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam 6.0, please visit www.brightmail.com.