IronPort issues biggest ever software upgrade

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 19 October 2005 18:52

Business IT - Technology

Email security specialist, IronPort Systems, has released a new version of its AsyncOS operating system with many new features describing it as "the largest software release in the company's five-year history."

The new software includes 'second generation' technology for stopping virus outbreaks, new technology for handling bounce messages, and for managing global system deployments.

IronPort's Virus Outbreak Filters analyse global traffic patterns to identify anomalies and then quarantine potential outbreaks until the traditional anti-virus signatures are updated. IronPort claims that "this breakthrough technology has provided protection an average of 13.6 hours ahead of signature availability for more than 100 major outbreaks. This translates into approximately five million infected messages stopped by IronPort's Virus Outbreak Filters, which would have otherwise infected desktops, saving IronPort customers an estimated $US100M dollars in cleanup costs.

IronPort has also opened a new Threat Operations Centre (TOC) facility in San Bruno, California, "with state of the art tools to produce alerts and rules designed to stay one step ahead of virus writers." It uses the world's largest traffic monitoring network, SenderBase.org, which derives sender data from more than 100,000 Internet points.

IronPort's Virus Outbreak Filters 2.0 uses a dynamic quarantine system. The filter automatically captures messages that appear to be part of a new outbreak by using broad outbreak detection rules. Immediately after the outbreak is detected, technicians at the TOC begin developing more refined rules as the outbreak unfolds in order to isolate the origin of the virus. Each time a new rule is issued, the quarantine is re-scanned, releasing messages that do not match the outbreak anomaly.

IronPort claims that "This powerful, dynamic system takes full advantage of both the human supervision provided by the TOC staff and IronPort's patent-pending technology, while placing no burden on local system administrators."