Tiscali World Online renews anti-virus partnership with Securedata

Tiscali World Online has renewed its contract with IT network security solutions provider Securedata, an ERP.com company, to protect its Internet gateway against viruses and malicious code. The contract provides the local ISP with Internet gateway protection through InterScan VirusWall, a product developed by Trend Micro and distributed locally by Securedata.

The solution provides real-time virus detection and clean-up for all SMTP, HTTP, and FTP Internet traffic at the gateway, and protects the ISP`s 150 000 subscriber base from virus-infected inbound mail.

"The only effective way to protect subscribers from viruses is to have a strong defence at the firewall," says Michelle Branco, B2C product and marketing manager at Tiscali World Online. "With the costs and damages arising from virus attacks, deploying this kind of solution should be a priority for all ISPs. It`s at the Internet gateway that viruses get in, and with an average of 200 to 300 new viruses entering the market on a monthly basis, it is vital that we protect our subscribers. In April alone, we stopped over 190 000 virus-infected e-mails from causing serious damage to our subscribers` PCs."

Branco notes that global virus outbreaks such as WORM_KLEZ.G, W97M_Melissa, and VBS_Loveletter have shown how effective malicious code technology can be, incurring huge costs, downtime and data loss for recipients.

InterScan VirusWall uses Trend Micro`s multi-threaded, 32-bit scan engine to detect known and unknown viruses. It recognises more than 16 types of compression encoding formats and scans down through 20 layers of compression. This includes malicious mobile code such as Java and ActiveX. Mervyn Coopen, operations director at Securedata, says InterScan VirusWall was the best option for Tiscali World Online as it is designed to protect Linux servers from infection at multiple points. "It is an easy-to-use yet comprehensive anti-virus application for large companies running on a Linux platform. It detects and removes viruses from inbound and outbound e-mail traffic in real-time.

"It offers automatic, scheduled, or one-button virus pattern file and scan engine updates through centralised management, and allows Tiscali World Online administrators to have full control of every aspect of virus protection, anytime, anywhere."

The ISP offers three anti-virus solutions:

* ScanMail is an e-mail virus scanning service available at no cost to all subscribers. Should an e-mail be infected with a virus, it will be quarantined and the subscriber and sender will be notified. Confidentiality of the e-mail is guaranteed.

* PC-cillin is an anti-virus product that can be bought from Tiscali World Online, providing complete anti-virus protection for home computers.

* HouseCall is a quick fix program that can be downloaded from the Tiscali World Online portal. Using the same technology as PC-cillin, it is a free version of the PC-based anti-virus software and provides temporary virus detection, uninstalling itself once it has completed a virus check on the user`s PC.

"These anti-virus options ensure that subscribers receive only virus-free e-mail, and that they themselves play no part in propagating viruses via e-mail," says Coopen. "The solution makes it possible for Tiscali World Online to remove the burden from its subscribers of ensuring that their virus protection software is always up to date."