GFI adds Grisoft's antivirus engine to e-mail content filtering

Security company GFI Software Thursday announced an upgrade to its MailSecurity content filtering software that includes new antivirus features.

Version 10 of MailSecurity, scheduled for availability in the third quarter, offers ten layers of protection against viruses, worms, and other malware that enter an organization through the inbound mail stream, company officials say.

The new release adds a fifth antivirus engine – Grisoft’s AVG – to the products the existing version already integrates, which includes antivirus engines from BitDefender, Kaspersky, McAfee, and Norman.

By combining these different antivirus engines, MailSecurity is able to offer better protection from malware than other content filtering products that may include only one or two, officials say. Five antivirus engines give the MailSecurity users a higher virus detection rate and the most up-to-date access to virus signatures, they say.

In addition to these five layers of antivirus protection, MailSecurity also scans for unknown viruses using its executable analyzer, which examines the purpose of an .EXE file attached to an inbound e-mail to filter out Trojans. The software also includes an HTML script sanitizer, e-mail exploit detection engine, attachment scanner, and e-mail content scanner, officials say.

This version also protects companies from losing sensitive information by scanning outbound e-mail to ensure employees aren't sending out messages that include certain terms or phrases.

MailSecurity 10 includes the option for e-mail administrators to get alerts regarding quarantined messages through RSS feeds, alleviating them from having to log in to the quarantine console.

MailSecurity can be implemented either at a company’s gateway or be integrated with Exchange at the mail server. Pricing for the latest version has not yet been announced.