Fortinet Unveils New Secure Messaging Platform and Antispam Service

SUNNYVALE, Calif., February 9, 2005 – Fortinet – the confirmed market leader in Unified Threat Management (UTM) and only provider of ASIC-accelerated, network-based antivirus firewall systems for real-time network protection – today unveiled two powerful new additions to its network security solutions and services portfolio: FortiMail, a secure messaging system, and FortiGuard-Antispam, a managed antispam service. The FortiMail Secure Messaging Platform and FortiGuard-Antispam Service effectively layer antispam technology to offer antispam defence in-depth at the network perimeter and the mail server – maximizing mail traffic performance by eliminating global spam at the network gateway, before it enters the corporate network.

Unwanted email or spam continues to present serious security challenges for enterprises and consumers alike. Increasingly, these messages contain spyware, grayware or other malicious attempts to adversely impact a customer’s computing and networking resources. While many world governments have been writing legislation and enforcing penalties around spam creation and delivery, spam continues to be difficult to regulate and catch. Industry researchers suggest that 60 to 70 percent of all enterprise email is spam, and recent statistics suggest that a good portion of spam contains viruses or other types of attacks.

“As an industry leader in the design and manufacture of advanced semiconductors, we have many daily demands on our network and cannot sacrifice network performance due to spam, viruses or other unwanted network traffic,” said Edward Huang, corporate IT infrastructure manager for Atmel. “Solutions such as Fortinet’s network security platforms and FortiGuard- Antispam Service help to minimize unwanted and malicious network traffic, without network performance degradation or a lot of administrative overhead, which is essential for ensuring a productive business.”

FortiMail Secure Messaging Platform
The FortiMail Secure Messaging Platform is a dedicated system based on Fortinet’s award winning FortiOS technology and includes an antivirus detection engine for virus and spyware protection and complete email scanning. FortiMail uses advanced spam detection and filtering methods such as FortiGuard-Antispam, access policy filtering, content filtering, global and user black/white list filtering, spam Real-time Blackhole List (RBL), per user Bayesian filtering so that individual users can set their own profiles, heuristics filtering and denial-of-service.

The FortiMail-400 system is the first in a family of secure messaging platforms and is designed for medium to large enterprises and remote branch offices. Future FortiMail systems will be available to secure messaging for high-volume, mission-critical infrastructures such as large enterprises, universities and managed security service providers (MSSPs). The FortiMail Secure Messaging Platform offers users three protective modes of operation:

Transparent mode: FortiMail platform is placed in front of the existing email server without any changes to the existing email topology to provide seamless integration into existing network environments. Gateway mode: FortiMail platform is placed in front of the existing email server providing in-bound and out-bound email relay services, which allows for scanning of both in-bound and out-bound email messages. Server mode: FortiMail platform provides complete email server functionality in addition to antivirus and antispam functionality, which is ideal for medium sized companies and remote branch office locations.

FortiGuard-Antispam Service
FortiGuard-Antispam Service is a new fully managed service that helps companies of all sizes reduce the amount of spam by eliminating it at the network perimeter. Fortinet developed this service internally and optimized it for operation on Fortinet’s FortiGate network security platforms and the new FortiMail system family. On either system deployment, FortiGuard- Antispam can significantly reduce the amount of unwanted and possibly malicious spam messages passing through corporate email servers.

Using Fortinet’s “dual pass” scanning technology in either the FortiMail or FortiGate systems, the FortiGuard-Antispam Service checks against known spammer IP addresses and email content with Universal Resource Identifier (URI) scanning. URI scanning looks deep into each email message to scan for well-known spam content such as spam URL links. The pairing of this new service with Fortinet security systems will help increase spam detection rates, as spammers get more creative and use infected PCs to deliver spam.

The FortiGuard-Antispam Service is managed by Fortinet’s global response team and subscribing customers benefit from up-to-date spammer black/white lists and URI content lists. The FortiGuard-Antispam Service offering can be enabled on any of the FortiGate systems running FortiOS v2.8 MR8 or FortiMail Secure Messaging Platforms running v1.2.

“With Fortinet’s new FortiMail Secure Messaging Platform and FortiGuard-Antispam Service, we are extending our portfolio of award winning technology and services for real-time network security to help enterprises deal with unwanted mail in an effective, manageable and cost-efficient way,” said Richard Hanke, vice president of product management at Fortinet. “Used together or separately, FortiMail and the FortiGuard-Antispam Service significantly reduce the amount of spam and email viruses while at the same time preserving network bandwidth and dramatically reducing the amount of processing power required to keep unwanted network traffic out of the enterprise.”

Distribution and availability
The FortiMail-400 system and FortiGuard-Antispam Service are available immediately. For more information on FortiMail, please visit:
www.fortinet.com/products/fortimail.html For more information on FortiGuard-Antispam, please visit:
www.fortinet.com/products/fortiguardantispam.html

About Fortinet (www.fortinet.com)

Fortinet is the confirmed leader of the Unified Threat Management market. The company’s award-winning FortiGate(tm) series of ASIC-accelerated antivirus firewalls, winner of the 2004 Security Product of the Year Award from Network Computing Magazine and the 2003 Networking Industry Awards Firewall Product of the Year, are the new generation of real-time network protection systems. They detect and eliminate the most damaging, content-based threats from e-mail and Web traffic such as viruses, worms, intrusions, inappropriate Web content and more in real time – without degrading network performance. FortiGate systems are the only security products that are quadruple-certified by the ICSA (antivirus, firewall, IPSec, NIDS), and deliver a full range of network-level and application-level services in integrated, easily managed platforms. Named to the Red Herring Top 100 Private Companies, Fortinet is privately held and based in Sunnyvale, California.