Press Release
POSTINI OFFERS ITS UNIQUE THREAT IDENTIFICATION DATA TO COMPANIES FOR REAL-TIME THREAT PREVENTION BASED ON PATENTED SENDER BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS TECHNOLOGY
Enterprises, Equipment Manufacturers and Solution Providers to Leverage Postini's Patented Real-Time IP Analysis Capabilities to Identify Network Threats as They Emerge
REDWOOD CITY, CA, October 24, 2005 — Postini today announced the general availability of its industry-leading Postini Threat Identification Network (PTIN) product, PTIN Access, to enterprises, solution providers, and original equipment manufacturers of email gateways and routers wishing to access the company's real-time sender behavior analysis technology for comprehensive threat prevention. Unlike traditional black lists (RBLs), PTIN proactively monitors sender behavior, identifies malicious activities, and automatically blocks email threats before any content analysis is applied.
Based on the largest volume of email connections of any security provider, PTIN Access takes advantage of the three billion SMTP connections Postini processes every week to create real-time visibility to sender behavior, enabling conditional access to networks from malicious senders.
"We're finding that there is a real benefit to the industry at large to tap into PTIN as the most comprehensive real-time information service on email threats and offenders," said Scott Petry, founder and senior vice president of products and engineering at Postini. "By sharing our proprietary knowledge of observed behavior from malicious senders, we're significantly enhancing the threat prevention capabilities of a broader group of solution providers as well as giving customers the ability to reduce the bandwidth and content analysis effort that is wasted on spam."
PTIN is a continuously refreshed repository of source IP addresses that have been observed to be engaging in unwanted or damaging actions. It identifies threat behavior in actual SMTP connections to all Postini customers, providing superior protection relative to black lists against directory harvest attacks (DHAs), phishing attacks, virus outbreaks, and spam. Based on a rating score assigned to each sender IP address on threat risk, PTIN allows its licensees to drop, block, redirect, throttle, blackhole, or quarantine messages based on the magnitude and duration of an attack. PTIN's patented design enables real-time detection of malicious IPs as well as the ability to remove IPs from the list as sender behavior reverts to normal.
"Unlike RBLs, which involve static, out-of-date lists that take hours or days to record offending sender addresses and months to get such addresses off, PTIN is a dynamic view of current malicious activity and typically holds about 40 thousand IP addresses with an average half-life of less than 3 hours," added Petry. "This allows for immediate action against senders as attacks occur, rather than after the fact."
"The network effect of tens of thousands of customers and billions of email messages per week to help manage threats on a real-time basis is a real plus for Postini customers," said Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research. "This ability to identify and eliminate threats at the connection level is important as a first line of defense."
Postini's more than 30,000 Perimeter Manager enterprise accounts benefit from PTIN technology today. Nearly half of all incoming threats are blocked at the connection level for customers of Postini's managed service. This technology allows Postini to block two types of email threats that cannot be defeated by content analysis alone: low-content spam and directory harvest attacks. This technology is also instrumental in identifying and blocking zombies, or bots, as they emerge on the network and attempt to propagate malware.
Licensees of PTIN Access can utilize the product in one of two ways: query the repository in real-time and accept or block traffic, or obtain periodic data snapshots of sender IPs demonstrating unwanted actions.
Postini is also making PTIN data available to email accreditors and certification agencies who work to validate legitimate email marketers, and is working with several OEMs and enterprises that are evaluating the use of embedded PTIN Access as part of their threat management architecture.
PTIN Access is available immediately.
About Postini
Postini is the global leader in Integrated Message Management, providing compliance, security, availability, and visibility solutions for corporate email and instant messaging. Postini offers a complete suite of services including message archiving and discovery, spam and virus blocking, and messaging continuity. The company's powerful managed services infrastructure seamlessly integrates with customers' infrastructure, providing uncompromising security for more companies than any other provider in the world. Postini's services protect organizations from a wide range of threats, reduce compliance and legal risks, ensure reliable communications, and enable the intelligent management and enforcement of enterprise policies that protect companies' intellectual property, reputations and business relationships. No other company does more to reduce the cost, risks and complications of securing and managing IP-based messaging for businesses. For more information contact Postini at 866-767-8461, or visit http://www.postini.com.
Marty Tacktill
Senior Director, Worldwide Public Relations
marty@postini.com
Kimberly Canedo
Neale-May & Partners
650.328.5555 ext. 278
kcanedo@nealemay.com
