Stories about: Proofpoint

Spam. It fills our in-boxes, wastes our time and spreads malware -- and it's only getting worse. According to Ferris Research, which studies messaging and content control, 40 trillion spam messages are expected to be sent in 2008, costing businesses more than $140 billion worldwide -- a significant increase from the 18 trillion spam messages sent in 2006 and the 30 trillion in 2007.

Proofpoint has acquired Fortiva, a seller of e-mail archiving services designed to speed up the process of responding to legal discovery requests.

Though data-loss prevention gear is proving a boon for corporate security, its "see all, know all" style of content monitoring can cast a harsh glare on business practices and legal issues that end up putting information-technology staff on the spot.

The NSW branch of the Royal Life Saving Society of Australia has replaced its on-site messaging solution with a hosted offering to control spam.

Data leakage prevention has become one of the hottest subsets of the IT security market, but organizations hoping to utilize the tools must retain realistic goals and find the right technologies to meet their individual business models, experts maintain.

The Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway P840 (v5.0) had excellent overall anti-spam performance, third in filtering and fifth in false positives, with a fair number of bulk false positives, but more than 97 per cent of spam caught. And the feature set is extensive, including application-layer firewall features for the back-end mail server, policy-based encryption, and capable outbound content protection.

E-mail security continues to be a hot-button issue for IT administrators, who now find more moving parts in mail security solutions than they did just a couple of short years ago. Fighting viruses and spam were the original spurs for creating e-mail security appliances, and anti-spam is still the most important component of mail security. But the solutions have evolved to meet a host of additional requirements. These include securing connections between users, both internal and external; preventing loss of corporate data; stopping new types of threats such as phishing, spyware, and other types of malware; and blocking DoS and other network attacks as well as some application-layer attacks on mail servers.

Servcorp engineering and IT services manager, Brett Olsen, estimates the company's e-mail volumes has inceased tenfold in the last four years.

How hot is the data leakage prevention market? Well, if the big boys like Cisco, Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro are snapping up DLP start-ups to the tune of US$1.6 billion in 2007, there must be a reason.

Not all the data-leak start-ups have been snapped up by the big guys. Here are five data-leak-prevention companies to keep an eye on.

Data breaches cost companies an average of US$197 per record in 2007, according to a study by the Ponemon Institute. The average cost of a data breach was US$6.3 million, up from US$4.8 million in 2006.