Spam defenses bear down

Security vendors are trying to fend off spam at the network perimeter and refining filtering techniques.

Network Associates this week will launch its McAfee SpamKiller appliance. Based on McAfee’s WebShield, the SpamKiller boxes provide scoring, filtering, and heuristic detection rules to shut out spam at the Internet gateway, said Zoe Lowthere, group product marketing manager at Santa Clara, Calif.-based McAfee.

To curb repeated spam attacks, the new appliances offer personalized lists to determine both acceptable and unacceptable senders. The product also includes RBL (real-time black hole list) support capable of quarantining or blocking e-mail.

Many customers, however, will not wake up to the spam problem until e-mail storage or upkeep is severely impacted, said Eric Hemmendinger, security analyst for Boston-based Aberdeen Group.

“When you have a pipe that flows too much water, you can get a bigger pipe, which gets expensive, or you can figure out whether all that water really needs to come in,” Hemmendinger said.

IronPort Systems next month will ship an e-mail gateway appliance that leverages reputation filtering to identify the source of spam. The IronPort C60 can capture information about a sender, such as country of origin, and whether or not the sender receives return mail.

Next month, Scotts Valley, Calif.-based SurfControl will roll out E-mail Filter 4.7, featuring tools to weed out hidden code within HTML e-mails.

Lastly, Deerfield.com later this month plans to introduce VisNetic MailPermit, gateway software to verify a message sender’s legitimacy.