July 08, 2008

Can Proactive Anti-Botnet Technology Work?

Engate Technology Corporation, a leading anti-spam provider announced the latest release of its flagship product, Engate MailSentinel 3.6 last week. According to Engate, the new release introduces significant enhancements to its proprietary database which they claim enables organizations to instantly detect botnets and preemptively stop the delivery of email-borne attacks such as spam, viruses and worms at the protocol level with customer-proven 99% accuracy.

Their press release makes some interesting claims:

Utilizing global network intelligence, Engate’s advanced network profiling technology delivers unprecedented real-time visibility into malicious sources from around the world. Engate’s anti-botnet solution employs patented network profiling, source verification, and anti-forgery techniques to identify and block email-borne botnet attacks in real-time and at the protocol layer, while allowing legitimate email to pass to the recipient.

Engate uniquely profiles every IP address within the network, segregates legitimate mail servers from all other network hosts, and establishes proprietary ’smart rules‘ that have the unique ability to immediately identify compromised computers, detect protocol fraud, and intelligently reject illicit connections at the network level. Engate’s global intelligence is instantly aware of new computers that become members of botnets and stops the distribution of email-borne threats at the protocol level, before it reaches the enterprise gateway and has a chance to compromise IT resources, slow down network performance, crash servers and invade privacy.

Unlike traditional content filter and reputation security technologies, Engate cannot be compromised because it pro-actively works with the source of networks at the protocol layer rather than reactively filtering and storing spam messages inside the network. Engate’s protocol-independent technology is ideal for SMTP, instant messaging, mobile applications, and protocols such as VoIP as they become an increasingly popular mechanism to distribute malicious files and executables.

It's an interesting approach but I have doubts if it will work in the long term. We're at war with the spammers and botnet herders and it's an escalating arms race. I think the only way to stop them is to throw them behind bars.

Posted in Tech News by #!/usr/bin/geek at 2008-07-08 00:09 Eastern

Tags: botnet irc computersecurity coporatesecurity datasecurity hacker hackers hacking