Posted by SecExtra on April 29th, 2009

Network Box, the managed security company, has released a new heuristics package which significantly improves spam detection (this includes malware carried over spam email) and also its own high-performance rules engine which increases scanning speeds by 100 per cent. This makes Network Box’s mail scanning system the most effective on the market.

Network Box has released two new heuristic mail scanning modules:
• The first module looks for suspicious characteristics of a threat variant, even before that variant has been recognised and a signature developed. The result is that new variants of known threats can be blocked effectively, based on these characteristics.
• The second module searches for attributes that indicate an email has been produced by a botnet, such as the formation of the email header, and the mechanics of the SMTP transaction, in order to block even new variants of botnet-produced emails. In the first few hours of its release, this module blocked more than 25,000 malicious messages from 16,000 sources. Because it identifies aspects of a botnet, before having to scan the content of the message, this heuristic module is also extremely effective at detecting and blocking other messages produced by that botnet.

The company has also released its own NBRules engine, developed by Network Box’s Internet Security team to replace the previous pattern matching engine. The company is migrating all clients to the new system from 5 May 2009. NBRules is highly-tuned, and is able to target rules at particular message sections, selecting which threat signatures should be run against which sections of the message, based on textual, message structure, content, heuristic and other in-depth analysis. The result is that scan times are reduced and more email can be scanned with lower CPU usage, while still maintaining high performance.

Simon Heron, Internet Security Analyst at Network Box says: “We’re taking the very best systems on the market and improving on them. We now have the most effective combination of weapons against spam and malware on the market.”

For more information on Network Box’s email scanning products, see http://www.network-box.co.uk