Symantec announces Symantec Mail Security 8300 Series

10th October 2006

Symantec today announced Symantec Mail Security 8300 Series, its next-generation mail security solution that reduces risks to information flowing in and out of the enterprise via e-mail. New integrated content filtering helps organizations protect against data leakage while ensuring compliance with external regulations and internal corporate policies related to e-mail content.

"The enhancements available in Symantec Mail Security 8300 Series provide customers with significantly improved features and extra functionality that will enable them to better protect their information assets, while minimizing the amount of spam and viruses that end-users must contend with," said Gary Cannon, president and co-founder, Advanced Internet Security, Inc. "The most exciting enhancement is in the content filtering area, which we believe our customers will greatly appreciate. Symantec Mail Security 8300 Series is definitely a best-of-breed solution."

"Security officers tell me that e-mail is the most valuable application in the enterprise; our research shows it is also the most likely source of confidential data leaks," said Eric Ogren, security analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group. "Organizations require an approach to security that is easy to manage while protecting the business against unauthorized exposure of confidential data. Symantec helps customers deploy secure messaging by integrating content inspection, message auditing and archiving, and pre-built compliance guidelines into a single manageable appliance."

"The threat landscape has evolved dramatically in the last 18 months. Today it's not just about keeping threats out of an organization, but ensuring that confidential corporate data stays inside the organization," said Jeremy Burton, group president, Enterprise Security and Data Management, Symantec. "Symantec Mail Security 8300 Series proactively protects a company's confidential information from both internal and external threats."

Symantec Mail Security 8300 Series features integrated, best-of-breed anti-spam, antivirus, and extensive content filtering technologies that stop inbound and outbound e-mail threats. The expanded list of content filtering tools include per-domain and policy-based TLS message encryption, incident management, and keyword and regular expression scanning inside all parts of a message including attachments. These tools, along with true file type recognition help administrators comply with internal policies and external regulations.

A new Premium Content Control add-on subscription extends the basic content filtering capabilities to help organizations mitigate risks associated with data leakage and comply with industry regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). The subscription offers 50 pre-built confidential data policies, including 15 that address specific industry regulations. Using these policy templates, organizations can add their company-specific actions to address the most common compliance regulations and data best practices. The add-on subscription also includes 60 pre-built dictionaries containing keywords and phrases that support policy templates, including drug, treatment, and disease keywords for HIPAA and financial terms for SOX. Finally, it offers more than 35 pre-built patterns used to search for confidential information such as Social Security numbers, U.S. Passport numbers, drivers' license numbers, and ABA routing numbers.

Symantec Mail Security 8300 Series also delivers day-zero virus prevention that minimizes the period of vulnerability between the detection of a new virus and the dissemination of antivirus definitions. Leveraging the Symantec Probe Network's real-time visibility into attachments crossing the Internet and onsite heuristics and analysis, suspicious attachments that exhibit qualities of viruses and mass-mailing worms are identified and rerouted to a queue, where they are held until definitions are available. Administrators can also delete the message, strip the attachment, generate a notification, or perform other actions on a per-group basis. Graphical message tracking enables administrators to easily determine the action taken on any e-mail processed by the appliance, while on-box connection throttling uses local reputation analysis to reduce spam and improve filtering performance by rejecting malicious senders at the IP level.

Easy to install, Symantec Mail Security 8300 Series operates transparently in a corporate network and is designed to scale to meet the growing needs of an organization. Depending on configuration, it improves performance and scalability for organizations with 150,000 or more users and e-mail loads in excess of 25 million messages a day. In addition, administrators can also easily manage multiple appliances from a single web-based console, gaining insight into trends, attack statistics, and compliance incidents.

Powered by the industry-leading Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam engine, Symantec Mail Security 8300 Series leverages more than 20 spam-prevention techniques, including spam signatures, heuristics, reputation filters, language identification, and proprietary methods. Automatic spam-rule updates issued every five minutes help ensure customers have up-to-the-minute protection from new threats, while real-time scanning using award-winning Symantec AntiVirus technologies protects against email threats. The technology also enables organizations to achieve anti-spam effectiveness rates of greater than 95 percent and accuracy rates against false positives of 99.9999 percent, allowing companies to safely delete spam without review.

Source: www.symantec.com