Universities get secure with Webroot.

Webroot, a leading Internet security provider for the consumer, enterprise and SMB markets, today announced that dozens of higher education institutions, including the University of Missouri, Residential Life, Dallas County Community College District and the Trinity School for Ministry, have selected cloud-based security services from Webroot to protect them from data loss, network downtime and other security threats.

At the University of Missouri, Residential Life, Missouri's largest public research university, users were inadvertently clicking on malicious links or visiting sites that were infested with malware. The IT team – User Support Analyst Justin Harris and Support Systems Administrator Eric Leiss – were fighting an uphill battle; malware infections were coming in so fast that machines were being rendered unusable. Already strapped for resources, the team was rebuilding one or two machines per week, leaving no time for the other work to be done.

"Our endpoint security used to be enough, but it can't keep up against today's threats," said Harris. "We still need it for remediation, but we needed that extra layer of defense at the perimeter and selected Webroot® Web Security Service to protect us from the Web attack vector. We no longer have to re-image machines weekly and end users have not been affected – aside from being glad that the machines are running faster."

Dallas County Community College District, a long-time user of Webroot AntiSpyware Corporate Edition on the desktop, evaluated Webroot Email Security Service and saw immediate results. Not only was the IT staff impressed with the ease of implementation, but they also recorded an immediate reduction of spam. The service blocked as many as 60,000 more spam messages each day than both of the district's previous anti-spam appliances combined.

"The results we saw during our initial trial of Webroot Email Security Service were so impressive that we decided to fully implement the service to our 9,000 faculty, staff and administrators before the trial was even complete," said Lilith Calbridge, network support specialist, Dallas County Community College District. "Users saw an immediate increase in productivity once their mailboxes were not cluttered with spam messages. With its advanced features and capabilities, this product is better suited for the needs of a large institution like Dallas County Community College District than any other system I have worked with."

The Trinity School for Ministry, a graduate school of religion located in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, was using another vendor's antivirus software at the endpoint, but it was not stopping the infections. IT Manager Heather Henkel said things were getting so bad she had to find a new solution. The school chose the Webroot Web Security Service and replaced Kaspersky on the desktop with Webroot AntiSpyware Corporate Edition with AntiVirus. Since deploying the Webroot solutions in September 2009, Trinity has had a clean, malware-free network.

"Webroot security solutions have made my life easier," Henkel said. "We are saving users from being infected, which is a boost in productivity for everyone. It's really a win-win. We haven't had to call support yet for anything. It simply works and does what it says it does. You can't ask for more than that!"

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Trend Micro is introducing Trend Micro Hosted Email Security

Trend Micro is introducing Trend Micro^™ Hosted Email Security - based on a new platform - which will create a new mission-critical service standard for what small and large customers should expect from their hosted email security vendors.

"We're listening to customers and they're telling us, 'Email is mission critical. Email security should be mission critical, too,'" said Eric Jensen, senior product marketing manager for Trend Micro. "With our new and improved Trend Micro Hosted Email Security, customers will receive 100 percent service uptime, 99 percent or better spam blocking and zero email-based viruses - or money back. In addition, we're including our #1 rated anti-malware technology to ensure that customers have the very best solution to stop malicious URLs embedded in their email."

No Maintenance Required by IT Staff

In today's challenging economic times, IT staff and end-user employees are working longer and harder than ever. This is driving businesses to look at new ways to find more time in the day for their employees.

"According to our email best practices benchmarking, adding-in hosted email security will typically reduce the time that IT staff must spend on email security maintenance by up to 75 percent (or more in some cases) versus continuing with on-premise email security only," says messaging industry expert, Michael Osterman of Osterman Research.

"Trend Micro continues to solidify their hosted offerings within their content security product portfolio with this exciting new release. All hosted services are connected to the Trend Micro^™ Smart Protection Network^™ infrastructure to give maximum protection against threats on a real- time basis," says John Maddison, senior vice president, Software as a Service (SaaS) and general manager, xSP Business for Trend Micro.

Always-Up-To-The-Minute Security Powered by the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network Infrastructure

Trend Micro scans, filters and correlates more than 20 billion emails, Web sites and files every single day, and then leverages that data to rapidly identify and respond to emerging threats, and improve the existing response to known threats. The engine processing all this traffic across millions of customers, multiple products, and hosted and on-premise environments is the Smart Protection Network infrastructure.

As Trend Micro extends its business into hosted security, customers will benefit in real-time rather than having to wait for the next update -- as the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network engine improves its security response. Every new Trend Micro hosted security customer joins millions of other Trend Micro customers to help create better and better security to keep out the bad guys in real time.

What's new and different?

Purpose-built to be #1 for anti-spam and anti-malware

In independent benchmarking, West Coast Labs found that Trend Micro's previous version of hosted email security - InterScan™ Messaging Hosted Security (IMHS) - was the #1 top-rated email security solution when compared to other leading vendors. Trend Micro has included all the core engines that enabled IMHS to achieve that rating into Trend Micro Hosted Email Security, and implemented additional technology to further improve increase spam blocking efficacy.

In a second set of independent benchmarking for stopping malware, NSS Labs tested a number of well-known endpoint security vendors in a real-world environment. Trend Micro again came out at #1, stopping up to 15 percent more malicious URLs and malware than the next two largest security vendors, and Trend Micro Hosted Email Security now includes this industry-leading anti-malware technology to stop malicious URLs embedded in email.

Purpose-built for Mission Critical Quality of Service (QoS)

Trend Micro has made significant investments and proprietary revisions into its hosted security infrastructure and backend processes, which includes incurring a significant penalty with money due back to customers if Trend Micro does not meet service availability and uptime commitments. In addition, Trend Micro Hosted Email Security runs in data centers around the world that are certified to ensure mission critical quality of service and 100 percent data privacy.

Due to these investments and revisions, Trend Micro is now able to provide a new, significantly enhanced Service Level Agreement with the following provisions:

• 100 percent uptime with penalties that are up to 3 times stronger than other vendors - NEW.
• 99 percent or better spam blocking - NEW.
• Zero email-based viruses.
• No more than three in one million emails incorrectly classified as spam - NEW.
• No more than one minute of email delivery delays - no matter where you are in the world - NEW.
• Support responsiveness within specified timeframes based on the severity of the incident.

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Security flaws found in 'smart' utility meters

Computer-security researchers say new "smart" meters that are designed to help deliver electricity more efficiently also have flaws that could let hackers tamper with the power grid in previously impossible ways.

At the very least, the vulnerabilities open the door for attackers to jack up strangers' power bills. These flaws also could get hackers a key step closer to exploiting one of the most dangerous capabilities of the new technology, which is the ability to remotely turn someone else's power on and off.

The attacks could be pulled off by stealing meters — which can be situated outside of a home — and reprogramming them. Or an attacker could sit near a home or business and wirelessly hack the meter from a laptop, according to Joshua Wright, a senior security analyst with InGuardians Inc. The firm was hired by three utilities to study their smart meters' resistance to attack.

These utilities, which he would not name, have already done small deployments of smart meters and plan to roll the technology out to hundreds of thousands of power customers, Wright said.

There is no evidence the security flaws have been exploited, although Wright said a utility could have been hacked without knowing it. InGuardians said it is working with the utilities to fix the problems.

Power companies are aggressively rolling out the new meters. In the U.S. alone, more than 8 million smart meters have been deployed by electric utilities and nearly 60 million should be in place by 2020, according to a list of publicly announced projects kept by The Edison Foundation, an organization focused on the electric industry.

Unlike traditional electric meters that merely record power use — and then must be read in person once a month by a meter reader — smart meters measure consumption in real time. By being networked to computers in electric utilities, the new meters can signal people or their appliances to take certain actions, such as reducing power usage when electricity prices spike.

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The Security Innovation Network Seeks Disruptive Cyber Technologies for 'Showcase' at National Press Club

Security Innovation Network (SINET), which promotes cyber security innovation and government–business collaboration, announces that applications are being taken for the “IT Security Entrepreneurs’ Showcase” at the National Press Club in Washington DC,” on October 27, 2010. As the U.S. Federal government and private industry contend with escalating cyber threats from adversaries around the globe, the Showcase accelerates the search and discovery of ‘best in class’ cyber security technologies, matching these innovations to the most urgent needs of civilian, defense, and intelligence agencies and the commercial sector.

“The IT Security Entrepreneurs’ Showcase takes public-private sector collaboration to a new level, giving companies with products of the highest merit an ideal opportunity to have their solutions evaluated and noticed by an audience representing private industry, NSA, DoD, DHS, Federal Government, system integration, research, investment banking, and venture capital,” said Robert Rodriguez, founder of the Security Innovation Network.

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