IronPort Releases Enterprise Anti-Spam Device

February 13th, 2007: IronPort Systems reckons it has the most powerful enterprise anti-spam device in the industry in its hands with the release of its new C650 Email Security Appliance.

According to IronPort, the last 12 months has witnessed a significant increase in the scale and complexity of spam attacks. Volumes of dodgy mail have grown exponentially and spammers are now using more sophisticated techniques such as image-based spam to get around filters.

The company says that by the end of 2006, image-based spam accounted for more than 30 per cent of all spam messages. This is a major problem due to the size of the message. A typical text–based spam message is 3 kilobytes, whereas the average image-based spam message is 30 kilobytes. More messages with larger volumes put a huge burden on anti-spam products, potentially resulting in mail queue backups and delivery delays.

To combat this, IronPort has introduced the C650, a device that it says scales with spam volumes and uses the company’s AsyncOS. The OS is a proprietary operating system optimised for email that IronPort claims doubles the scanning throughput offered by previous generations.

When it comes to filtering, IronPort says its devices features integrated URL filtering from a leading vendor, 52 pre-defined website filter categories, and the ability for administrators to create more customised categories. Overall, the database spans more than 21 million websites, 3.5 billion pages, covering more than 70 languages and 200 countries and is constantly updated.

The appliance also includes IronPort’s third-generation reporting engine for both real-time and historical reporting, on-box.  The reports are fully interactive, and give an administrator a highly granular view of how effective a given policy is.

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