Symantec Brightmail Gateway 8.0 Adapts to Environment and Starves Spam Connections

Symantec Reintroduces Brightmail Branding for Symantec Mail Security Series Solutions

THE HAGUE, Netherlands – Symantec Vision . – As part of its Information Risk Management (IRM) strategy to secure and manage unstructured information such as email and online collaborative content, Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced Symantec Brightmail Gateway 8.0, its new messaging security platform. Formerly known as Symantec Mail Security 8300 Series, Brightmail Gateway 8.0 introduces new sender reputation technology allowing organizations to protect their unstructured information such as email, instant messages and files more completely and new management features that reduce risk and hands-on administration.

A recent Symantec survey showed that the majority of organizations are experiencing greater than 30 percent year-over-year growth in email. Symantec research also shows that between 2001 and 2008 spam grew from 8 to 80 percent of all email, with many organizations reporting upwards of 95 percent of email as spam.

“With spam messages continuing to grow in both sheer quantity and complexity, email administrators need perimeter protection that brings them confidence by prioritizing their legitimate email while starving spammers,” said Francis deSouza, senior vice president, Information Risk Management, Symantec. “With Brightmail Gateway we’re declaring to customers that you can have both a scalable and an easy to use solution that catches more than 97 percent of spam while flagging less than one false positive in every million legitimate emails.”

Adaptive Reputation Management

Brightmail Gateway offers Adaptive Reputation Management, a unique approach that combines global reputation, self-learning local reputation and a new connection class management approach that prioritizes email from reputable senders while rejecting email from spammers. It enables Brightmail Gateway to block up to 95 percent of spammers at the connection-level, giving more resources to reputable senders while starving spam connections.

This resource prioritization uses local reputation that adapts to a customer’s specific sender environment and Symantec’s spam sender reputation database which is being increased by tenfold. This database leverages the Symantec Global Intelligence Network, which collects data from more than 200 countries that is then analyzed by the 300 person Security Response team.

Protecting completely while email is increasing in volume and sophistication requires speed and new spam filtering techniques. Brightmail Gateway leverages Symantec’s FastPass message processing approach to allow email from known good senders to bypass spam scanning entirely in order to improve scanner scalability and throughput. In addition, a new Bounce Attack Prevention feature signs outgoing messages in order to effectively eliminate an entire class of bounceback spam, an attack in which spammers place legitimate email addresses into a spam message’s forged ‘from’ header causing the email account holder to receive a flood of undeliverable messages.

“Symantec’s new messaging security gateway takes the guesswork out of protecting our network from inbound malware,” said Mike Miller, director of information security at Media General, a media conglomerate which owns 25 daily newspapers, more than 275 smaller publications, 20 network-affiliated television stations, and a large number of interactive media operations. “Symantec Brightmail Gateway will allow me to easily scale my protection—whether my spam levels are at 70 percent or 98 percent. It constantly adapts to protect our network from the latest emerging threats.”

Simplified Install and Administration

To help email administrators accomplish more with less effort and cost, Symantec has reduced administration time by up to 70 percent. Brightmail Gateway allows customers to install and manage their messaging security infrastructure in a more automated fashion that also requires minimal ongoing monitoring and maintenance. For example, the speed of message audit log searches has been improved 50 fold, allowing administrators to more quickly and accurately identify what happened to any particular message. In addition, Brightmail Gateway includes new wizards and default configurations to guide the installation process and implement best practices for deployment so that customers can deploy to production more quickly.

Symantec has added summary diagnostics to the administrator console of Brightmail Gateway, allowing administrators to instantly evaluate the health and status of their entire deployment. This information can help administrators proactively address potential emerging problems before they cause any disruptions to end users.

“Gateway filtering with both inbound and outbound protection should be a cornerstone component of any information risk management strategy,” said Brian Burke, program director of IDC’s Security Products Group.

The Symantec Brightmail Family

The renaming of Brightmail Gateway highlights the Brightmail Antispam engine behind Symantec’s award-winning mail security products. The Brightmail name is being shared with the Symantec Brightmail Traffic Shaper and Symantec Brightmail Message Filter, formerly the Symantec Mail Security 8160 and Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam respectively.

Availability

Symantec Brightmail Gateway 8.0 is scheduled to be available in early 2009 directly from Symantec or through Symantec’s worldwide network of value-added authorized resellers, distributors and systems integrators. For more information, please visit www.symantec.com/business/brightmail-gateway.