Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2001/08/30/kaspersky_locks_into_virus_protection/

Kaspersky locks into virus protection for SMTP gateways

Ready by October, and you need Linux

By Kieren McCarthy

Posted in Security, 30th August 2001 11:56 GMT

Kaspersky Labs has released a beta of its anti-virus product that will work for SMTP gateways. The software will sit between the Internet and the email server, filtering any emails before they hit your system. This means that it will work independently of whatever server you are running.

The full product will be available in October, the company has announced, and will work only on gateways running Linux, though FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Solaris will be supported in future releases. No price as yet, but Kaspersky's current anti-virus software for servers costs $560.

With recent high-profile viruses like Code Red and SirCam (we're still getting SirCam even now), Kaspersky has chosen a good time to announce a piece of software that will filter messages before they get to the email server. According to the company, it will check "all sections of e-mail messages: attached files (including archived and compressed), the message body, and other messages on any nesting level". It will also kill any DoS attacks at SMTP level.

When an infected message is found, it can be blocked, deleted or ignored. In each case, a notification email will be sent to the sysadmin.

If you want to know more, visit Kaspersky's site here.

For both yours and our sanity, here is the definition of SMTP according to Webopedia. SMTP: Short for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, a protocol for sending email messages between servers. Most e-mail systems that send mail over the Internet use SMTP to send messages from one server to another; the messages can then be retrieved with an email client using either POP or IMAP. In addition, SMTP is generally used to send messages from a mail client to a mail server.

Okay? ®