Monday, June 25, 2007

Cisco acquires e-mail security company

Cisco Systems is moving quickly to integrate technology it's gaining from buying e-mail security firm IronPort Systems.

Company officials said in interviews here about the US$850 million IronPort acquisition, which closed today, that e-mail and Web site reputation datastreams from IronPort appliances will be fed to Cisco firewalls by the end of this year, and then be extended to the company's routers, switches and other devices in 2008.

The service checks the source of e-mail and Web sites embedded in e-mail against a database of suspicious sites IronPort calls SendBase.

In addition, early next year IronPort's Layer 4 traffic monitor technology, which watches for spyware signatures, will also be added first to Cisco firewalls in the first quarter of next year and then to other products.

The capabilities should be able to pushed as a software upgrade to users of existing Cisco products, said Richard Palmer, senior vice-president and general manager of the company's security technology group, under which IronPort will operate as a separate business unit.

In buying IronPort, Cisco is expanding its security offerings from managing networks to include spyware and malware data inspection to begin offering what it dubs wide traffic inspection, correlating information from several network devices.

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