On Message with Ben Gross

Compliance as a Commodity

November 16th, 2005

SOX, HIPAA, GLB and other laws and regulations have created something of an arms race between end users determined to communicate what, when, how and with whom they see fit, and corporate legal and IT departments charged with enforcing corporate policies.

Blocking “adult content,” inappropriate financial communications, and leakage corporate IP began with scanning of email. Users responded by moving to IM and webmail, and even some companies began to encourage the use of private webmail accounts for personal business.

But now things are shifting again. Email and IM scanning and logging systems are commodity products, and fast becoming standard features for all anti-spam appliances. Monitoring and logging is being extended to cover traffic on port 80 (i.e. webmail), FTP, and VoIP, FTP. End user discretion is increasingly viewed as a bad thing. Among the press releases this week:

CipherTrust announced IronNet, which will inspect HTTP- and FTP-based activity including WebMail services such as MSN Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and Google GMail, message board and blog postings, peer-to-peer and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services such as Skype™, and FTP transmissions to prevent unauthorized protocol use before the infraction occurs. IronNet will monitor and log all outbound messaging traffic, and encrypt outbound traffic. CipherTrust IronNet will be available in the first quarter of 2006 and pricing will start at $5,995.

BorderWare Technologies, Inc. announced MXtrem Mail Firewall version 6.0, which filters inbound and outbound mail to ensure policy compliance. MXtreme is sold as a hardened appliance with a base price of $4,750.

Intradyn announced a partnership with Akonix to allow users of its ComplianceVault email archiving and retrieval appliances to index, archive, and search instant messages (IMs) to meet regulatory, e-discovery, and other internal company requirements. ComplianceVault starts at under $10,000.

Link roundup for 12/7/07 Shorter URLs help phishers hook more victims | CNET News.com: CNet reports on findings from IBM Internet Security Systems on how hostnames used in phishing emai ...

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