Tag Team for Email Security
Tag Team for Email Security
October 9, 2008: Proofpoint 5.5, the latest version of the company's integrated email and data security solution, offers improved bounce management features that block 100 percent of "backscatter" spam.
As spam volumes have grown, backscatter -- the barrage of non-delivery report messages (NDRs) and auto-responses caused by spammers spoofing an organisation's email addresses -- has become an increasingly serious problem.
To combat this threat, Proofpoint 5.5 incorporates support for the latest BATV (Bounce Address Tag Validation) specification. BATV tags outbound messages and then validates incoming NDRs and auto-responses against those tags to block backscatter caused by spam attacks.
Previous generations of the Proofpoint MLX anti-spam engine have blocked 80 percent or more of all backscatter using patent-pending machine learning techniques. The new bounce management features allow organisations to block the remaining 20 percent of backscatter and improve overall spam detection accuracy beyond the industry-leading 99.8 percent+ spam detection rate delivered by MLX alone.
The new version enhances Proofpoint's suitability for global deployments with an array of internationalisation and non-English language features beyond the multi-lingual end-user interfaces and advanced, non-English spam detection capabilities of previous versions.
A new localisation framework allows Proofpoint 5.5 to support non-English languages and international (multi-byte) character sets in every part of the product including policy definitions, dictionaries and annotations.
Proofpoint's policy and content scanning engines now detect and "understand" text in any language, including multi-byte languages such as Japanese. Proofpoint Secure Messaging modules can match non-English keywords and dictionary items written in international character sets including Japanese, Chinese and Cyrillic (Russian).
Administrators can create policies that are triggered based on the language detected in the content of an email. For example, attach language-specific disclaimers or signatures to an outbound message depending upon the language in which it was written.International data loss prevention policies for email can be applied to outbound HTTP (including web-based email, blog postings and message board submissions) and FTP traffic using the Proofpoint Network Content Sentry module.
The advanced message tracking and log analysis features delivered by the optional Proofpoint Smart Search module have been enhanced. Proofpoint Smart Search now makes it easier to track messages and this module can be deployed with other Proofpoint modules or as a separate appliance.
Proofpoint Smart Search allows administrators and non-technical help desk personnel to trace messages in real-time, directly from the Proofpoint administrative interface. Pricing for Proofpoint on Demand, Proofpoint's Software-as-a-Service solution, starts at AU$3380 per year. Pricing for Proofpoint's on-premises appliance solution, the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway, starts at AU$9505 plus annual user license fees. Proofpoint modules for anti-spam, anti-virus, secure messaging, data loss prevention, large file transfer, advanced log analysis, multi-protocol policy enforcement and email archiving are priced separately.