In the security sphere, the latest news for new technology implementation came from Symantec. The information security company announced today the availability of Symantec Hosted Mail Security.

The new software is designed to reduce the burden faced by many IT organizations associated with increasing costs and difficulty maintaining on-site solutions, Symantec Hosted Mail Security provides comprehensive protection against spam, viruses and other unwanted content for inbound and outbound Internet email traffic.

Symantec Hosted Mail Security reduces the load on internal mail systems by filtering spam and malicious email content before it reaches a customer's network.

"Multiple threat defenses, such as anti-spam, antivirus and content filtering, combined with the easy management and deployment benefits inherent in a hosted solution, dramatically reduces the total cost of ownership associated with email security, " said Enrique Salem, senior vice president, security products and solutions, Symantec Corp.

The analysts define Instant Messaging as an important part of the business process. It is found that for many companies, various federal regulations require archiving of IM and the same time improved record retention and storage policies are implemented to facilitate litigation support.

Over the next three years, the adoption of enterprise instant messaging (IM) will increase three-fold, according to the CIOInsight report. The experts agree that already businesses find that they must strike a balance between mitigating security risks and maintaining regulatory compliance.

Experts at SophosLabs™, Sophos's global network of virus and spam analysis centres, have published recently a report detailing the most commonly used words that spammers include in their marketing messages.

"Spammers have a dilemma," explained Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "They want to sell certain products or include certain phrases in their spam emails, but they also know that many people will have filters looking for those words and automatically junking them. For this reason they use "obfuscation" to try and disguise the words from the anti-spam software."

Sophos researchers have found that the vast majority of spam - up to 80% - deploys obfuscation tricks to try and disguise the words, and slip them past anti-spam software at the email gateway.

Sophos (www. sophos.com) and Stalker Software (www. stalker.com) announced today a formal partnership. With this agreement, Stalker Software offers CommuniGate Pro messaging users a sophisticated and comprehensive anti-virus solution.

"Malicious threats have increased in volume, complexity and are spreading between business networks within seconds," said Richard Baldry, Head of Strategic Alliances at Sophos.

Stalker continues to expand its partnership with HP and recently added the OpenVMS platform to the list of supported operating systems to help further penetration into the mid-enterprise market.

"To remain competitive and effective, organizations must protect their internet connections from virus disruptions," said Vladimir Butenko, CEO of Stalker Software.

According to media reports, federal police in Brazil have arrested a suspected leader of a gang that stole $37 million from its victims' online bank accounts.

Sophos has previously identified a trend of Trojan horses being written specifically to target customers of Brazil's online banking websites and believes that Trojans are increasingly being used as a phishing device to steal money.

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