Kaspersky Labs announces the beta release of Kaspersky Anti-Virus for SMTP gateways
Kaspersky Labs, an international data-security software developer, announces the beta release of the popular Kaspersky Anti-Virus for SMTP gateways. The new program offers customers the opportunity of embedding a centralized anti-virus scanning for e-mail independent of the type of server being used.
Today, e-mail is the main source of malicious programs, with, according to the latest data, 80% of all instances of computer infection occurring via this means. It is for this reason that the key strategy for protecting a corporate network is the installing of a reliable anti-virus on an e-mail server. This permits the cleaning of all e-mail correspondence from malicious programs, preventing the delivery of infected messages to end users and the forwarding to external recipients.
Each organization has its own peculiarities that demand particular attention, specifically in relation to the organization’s computer infrastructure, allowing for the most effective means of fulfilling specific objectives. This is the reason for the existence of many types of e-mail servers, each of which must be equipped with adequate virus protection. In conjunction with this, the development of a special anti-virus program for each of the hundreds of existing e-mail servers is virtually an unattainable task. The solution to this problem is the embedding of an anti-virus scanning system for e-mail that filters correspondence before it has reached the e-mail handler. For this, the most effective means is filtering data at the SMTP protocol level.
Kaspersky Anti-Virus for SMTP gateways is a software system administering an anti-virus scanning of all incoming and outgoing SMTP traffic. The system is set up between the external environment and the internal e-mail server, cleaning up malicious code of all types from the passing streams, and also preventing DoS-attacks via SMTP. The program checks all sections of e-mail messages: attached files (including archived and compressed), the message body, and other messages on any nesting level. Kaspersky Anti-Virus also contains: a heuristic scanning engine that reliably defends against even future viruses; a Web-based management console for remote control; modules for automatically updating the anti-virus database and generating statistic reports.
Depending on the pre-set configuration, an infected message can be blocked (quarantine feature), deleted or ignored for each of the existing e-mail boxes. In all of these cases, the system administrator, as well as the sender and recipient, can be sent notification via e-mail regarding the detection of an infected message.
“Working on the SMTP protocol level makes Kaspersky Anti-Virus the universal and most effective means for e-mail anti-virus protection. The program can be used with any mail server, and does not depend on their limitations; the program is defined by higher productivity and requires less financial expenditure compared to anti-virus modules for firewalls. In addition to this, this type of defense does not have any negative effects on the general network fault-tolerance and does not require the reconfiguring of an e-mail server,” commented Michael Kalinichenko, Kaspersky Lab Technical Director.
The current version of Kaspersky Anti-Virus can be used on SMTP gateways running under the Linux operating system. Future versions will also support FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Solaris (Intel/Sparc). Kaspersky Labs is also planning to expand the SMTP protocol processing capability. In particular, future versions will be powered with a feature that enables the connection of additional (including third-party) SMTP traffic handlers; e.g., content filtering, back up systems, spam defense, encryption, behavior blocking, etc.
The release date for the fully functioning product version is set for October 2001.