Symantec also today announced the acquisition of Mi5 Networks, a privately held Web security company which offers the industry’s most innovative approach to Web gateway security by providing streaming technology that examines traffic coming into and leaving the enterprise. Symantec’s market-leading email gateway and endpoint security solutions combined with Mi5’s Web gateway technology will provide protection at the most common entry points to secure organizations against evolving Web-based malware.

“Our customers and partners have made it clear that security solutions that tie together multiple layers of protection offer the highest return for the lowest cost of management,” said Francis deSouza, senior vice president, Enterprise Security Group, Symantec. “Moving forward, with the acquisition of Mi5’s Web security technology, Symantec is further addressing the fastest growing path for malware to infect network environments and we look forward to integrating this technology into our security portfolio.”

Symantec Protection Suite Small Business Edition is an easy-to-use suite that protects critical business assets by securing against today’s malware and spam threats and by rapidly recovering client computer systems. This all-inclusive suite provides complete protection, creating a secure environment where computer system failures, malware, and spam risks are identified and addressed immediately. The ease-of-use, fast performance and unmatched protection allows small businesses to save valuable time and money with a suite that requires little administration to install, deploy and manage.

Symantec Protection Suite Enterprise Edition includes Symantec’s endpoint security, messaging security and system recovery technologies that allow customers to reduce the cost of securing their environments and effectively manage the inherent risks of today’s IT infrastructures. Multiple layers of protection ensure customers are accurately identifying and addressing risks while delivering consistent protection across platforms. In the event of system loss or failure, users may recover individual files and folders in seconds, or complete Windows systems in minutes, thus minimizing downtime. By combining security with backup and recovery, Symantec is enabling businesses to completely protect, easily manage and automatically control their valuable assets.

“Securing our network is essential for us to maintain an efficient working environment for our users,” said Mike Miller, director of Information Security, Media General. “Using Symantec’s security, anti-spam and backup solutions allows us to protect the flow of information critical to our business as well as reduce the costs and time required to manage our IT infrastructure.”

“With the Symantec Protection Suites, we are able to provide our customers with multiple layers of protection to protect them from a broad range of security risks,” said Steve Barone, CEO, Creative Breakthroughs. “As a Symantec partner, I’m excited about the fact that these are simple, easy-to-deploy solutions that can help us address the security needs of small businesses to enterprise customers.”

According to the Symantec Internet Security Threat Report Volume XIV, over 60 percent of all currently detected malicious code threats were detected in 2008. The continued growth and evolution of the Internet presents attackers with a growing range of targets and various means to launch malicious activity. Symantec observed an average of 75,158 active bot-infected computers per day in 2008, an increase of 31 percent from the previous period. In 2008, bot networks were responsible for the distribution of approximately 90 percent of all spam email. Symantec observed a 192 percent increase in spam detected across the Internet, from 119.6 billion messages in 2007 to 349.6 billion in 2008.

Symantec Protection Suite Enterprise Edition and Symantec Protection Suite Small Business Edition are backed by Symantec Security Response and the Global Intelligence Network. Symantec has established some of the most comprehensive sources of Internet threat data in the world through the Symantec Global Intelligence Network. This network captures worldwide security intelligence data that gives Symantec analysts unparalleled sources of data to identify and analyze, to deliver protection and provide informed commentary on emerging trends in attacks, malicious code activity, phishing, and spam.

[pehub]

Defensio competes with Akismet, the spam blocker that comes with Wordpress, and Mollom. One of Defensio’s features is that it can sort blocked comments by spamminess and also offers an API for use on Websites other than blogs.

Websense will incorporate Defensio into its ThreatSeeker Network, where it will help detect comment spam on blogs, forums, and social networks. Websense also plans on extending Defensio so that it works on broadly distributed Web applications.

The company recently used Defensio technology to detect malicious hackers on BarackObama.com. Moreover, Websense claims to have research showing that:

. . . more than 95 percent of all Web posts on blogs, forums and other sites are unwanted content such as spam and malicious content. Additionally, more than 70 percent of all Web spam and unwanted content is hosted on legitimate sites that allow user-generated content.

That sounds inflated to me, but comment spam definitely is a problem that needs to be squashed. So the more technologies out there trying to squash it, the better.

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CrunchBase Information

Defensio

Website:	defensio.com
Location:	Montreal, Canada
Founded:	June 1, 2007
Acquired:	January 27, 2009 by WebSense

Defensio, a spam blocker for blogs, has the unique ability to sort your blog’s blocked comments by “spamminess” so you don’t have to wade through them chronologically to find false positives. Defensio will rank comments that it labels as spam… Learn More

WebSense

Website:	websense.com
Location:	San Diego, California, United States
Founded:	1994
IPO:	2000

Websense is a San Diego-based company specializing in Web security gateway software. Their acquisition of Defensio extended their services to provide security for web blogs. Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

[techcrunch]