BIOS: Technology Means Business

Sunbelt Software has announced the release of its new third-generation enterprise messaging security solution, Sunbelt Messaging Ninja.

Built for Microsoft Exchange, the product boasts best-of-breed anti-virus, antispam and anti-phishing along with the most powerful attachment filtering available, wrapped in a plug-in framework that allows additional security features to be added easily.

Significantly, Sunbelt is offering the attachment filtering component of Ninja at no charge to all organisations for a limited time.

Because Ninja’s plug-in architecture was designed with flexibility and extendibility in mind, Ninja’s security functionality will broaden in the future to include automatic disclaimers, content filtering, content auditing, archiving and more.

“Sunbelt Messaging Ninja is a true third-generation mail security platform that provides a multi-layered, policy based approach to protecting enterprises against e-mail security threats. It is an extraordinarily powerful, robust security solution, providing comprehensive protection against all email-borne threats.” said Alex Eckelberry, president of Sunbelt Software.

“We started work on Ninja over two years ago, looking at security from a ground-up perspective of ‘what is relevant and necessary today’. The result is a product that we believe will change the messaging landscape, and reports from beta testers confirm the excitement behind this release.”

Using Ninja’s plug-in architecture, administrators can create custom policies for Active Directory users or groups and separate policy templates can be created for different groups or individuals, fine-tuning each policy to suit different constituent needs.

Unlike legacy security products that filter at the gateway, Ninja’s Suspicious Mail Attachment Removal Technology (SMART) is the first policy-based attachment filter that filters all attachments based on email direction- inbound, outbound or within the organization. Additionally, it actually looks inside many types of files to determine their true identity, as opposed to simply relying on file extensions. For a limited time, Sunbelt is offering Ninja's SMART attachment filtering for free to all organisations.

Ninja uses multiple industrial strength antivirus engines, Authentium and BitDefender, to scan inbound and outbound e-mail. This layered approach is significantly more effective than the common practice of relying on one vendor’s anti-virus engine.

For its antispam capabilities, Ninja uses two scanning engines: Cloudmark’s and Sunbelt’s, providing users with both a heuristic and signature-based approach. Spam can be managed in a variety of ways: deleted, centrally quarantined, tagged with a Subject line identification, or sent to a custom folder in the end-user’s Exchange mailbox. In addition, users can allow or block specific senders without any special desktop software required.

With the increasing number of phishing attacks, identifying legitimate email addresses from spoofed addresses is important. SPF helps determine if emails are spoofed, testing whether a specific email originated from its claimed domain. Ninja also supports the administrator’s choice of Real Time Blackholes (RBLs) as an added layer of spam protection.

Ninja delivers a broad range of pre-defined reports with the ability to customise reports based on individual needs. The database-driven reporting engine can generate information at the system, group, and/or user level. Administrators can choose options to show the number of inbound mail messages scanned, number of spam deleted or marked, number of viruses intercepted, number of filters triggered, percentage of viruses by name, and more.

Sunbelt Messaging Ninja is priced aggressively for all corporate environments and includes one year of support, updates and upgrades. New customers can purchase Sunbelt Messaging Ninja on a per-mailbox basis. Pricing includes the first year maintenance and starts at $166.25 for 5 mailboxes and goes down to $5.75 per mailbox in volume.

Users of Sunbelt’s other mail security solution, iHateSpam for Exchange, can upgrade to Ninja’s improved antispam functionality at no charge. Both the free attachment filtering component and a trial version of Sunbelt Messaging Ninja are available on Sunbelt Software’s Web site.

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