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Avinti Sees Surge in Blended Threat E-mails, Announces General Availability of NEWT Free Malware Security Service

NEWT Blocks E-Mail Attacks That Link to Web-Based Malware

LINDON, Utah - (December 6, 2007) - Avinti®, a proactive e-mail security solutions company, announced a recent surge in blended threat e-mails, likely linked to the increase in holiday spam messages. The company has seen an average of over 750 new, unique blended threats per day blocked by its NEWT (Neutralize E-mail and Web Threats) filters starting in the last week of November, up substantially from the prior period. In addition, the company announced that its free NEWT filter, previously in public beta, is now available to all users.

Blended threats are an increasingly popular way for hackers to bypass traditional e-mail security by using messages that include embedded hyperlinks to URLs or IP addresses on the Web. These sites, which are often hosted on botnet-infected computers, contain malware that is downloaded on the users system automatically and without their interaction. In order to be infected, users often just have to click on the link to the site. Some of the malware is also on legitimate sites that have been injected with a cross-site scripting hack, making detection and blocking by Web filters difficult.

NEWT is Avinti’s plug-in filter that runs on the most popular MTAs (Mail Transfer Agents) and leverages the power of Avinti’s iSolation Server to stop blended threat attacks. By using Avinti’s database of URLs and IP addresses that link to known malware sites, it can block, tag, or quarantine e-mails containing threats. Signatures for malicious Web sites, created by Avinti’s iSolation Server and pulled from malware lists, are regularly forwarded to the NEWT agent, updating it with the latest threats. Reciprocally, new URLs are fed anonymously to iSolation Server by NEWT, building off of the power of the collective NEWT agents.

“While NEWT is a Freeware product, it takes advantage of the patent-pending technology we’ve developed in our iSolation Server for real-time threat detection,” said William Kilmer, Avinti CEO. “When the iSolation Server detects a malicious URL sent by NEWT, we automatically create a signature for NEWT, providing updates regularly.”

Avinti announced NEWT in October as a public beta. Since that time Avinti has limited the number of users. Now, after a successful test period and an accumulated signature database of hundreds of thousands of known malware sites in use, they are making NEWT available for general release to the public. “The benefit of NEWT is that we can leverage in the cloud processing of threats with the unique distributed collection of URLs anonymously from our NEWT agents, which gives us unprecedented intelligence and rapid response time to these quickly changing threats,” said Kilmer. “The network effect of NEWT significantly improves the intelligence of stopping blended threats.”

As a freeware plug-in, NEWT works with Sendmail, and Postfix MTAs. The company plans to launch a solution for Exim in the near future and will consider other platforms. The user downloads and installs NEWT as a plug-in, which contains an updated list of known malware sites, and receives incremental updates of new malware signatures approximately every 30 minutes. The NEWT agent and more information about blended threats can be found at www.avinti.com/newt.

For more information on NEWT, iSolation Server and Avinti, visit www.avinti.com.

About Avinti

Avinti is a proactive e-mail security solutions company that has taken a different approach to protecting enterprises from security threats. Avinti’s iSolation Server proactively and safely blocks threats not detected by traditional security solutions. The company’s investors include Sequel Venture Partners, Symantec, and vSpring Capital.

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