E-mail administrators hoping to keep their systems clean of viruses and looky-loos engaging in schadenfreude have a new Web hangout.
On Monday, IronPort launched Threat Operations Center Report, a public portal to key data collected by the e-mail security provider.
The Web site notifies visitors of virus outbreaks prior to signature availability; identifies top phishing attacks; and provides e-mail traffic trend analysis produced by Threat Operations Center (TOC) technicians working around the clock in the command and control center for the company’s preventive security service.
With the launch of the TOC Report, said Tom Gillis, IronPort senior vice president of worldwide marketing. “If we see a virus breaking out, we put the indicator right on our Web page and allow anyone to get the information immediately.”
IronPort makes e-mail security appliances and uses data on e-mail traveling through them to look for unusual trends or patterns that the company claims can identify outbreaks of viruses and phishing eight hours before traditional anti-virus signatures are available. Because the company claims some of the world’s largest ISPs as customers, it says that it sees 25 percent of all the world’s e-mail traffic — and has a leg up on identifying threats.
“IronPort protects e-mail security by analyzing the global traffic patterns of a given sender,” Gillis said. “As mail flows through our boxes, we send traffic reports back to our central database. It’s like air traffic control for e-mail.”
“Data is key to powering these services,” Gillis said. While 75 service providers already use the data, he said, the company decided an open portal would enable even more information sharing.
According to the new TOC Report, there were 10 new virus outbreaks between Dec. 17, 2004, and Jan. 31, 2005 — but none since Feb. 1 or thus far today when the report went live.
The report offers insight into global electronic communications trends and threats. For example, in January, the volume of e-mail traffic decreased after the winter holidays, not resuming its normal volume of around 19.6 billion messages a day until the last week of the month. And Yahoo.com was the top domain sending e-mail globally for the month, with Comcast
coming in second.
