Engate Awarded New Patent for Preemptive Connection-level Botnet and Email Security

(09/02/2009)

Engate Technology Corporation has announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has approved the issuance of a new patent which covers methods for monitoring communications between sending and receiving Mail Transfer Agents (MTA) to determine the legitimacy of a message.

This additional patent strengthens Engate's intellectual property portfolio and provides the company with ownership of key innovations that address critical email security needs of large enterprises, service providers and technology OEMs. The issued U.S. patent titled, "An Unsolicited Message Rejecting Communications Processor", builds on Engate’s network profiling connection management technology that preemptively identifies the threat source and stops email-borne botnets, phish, spam, viruses and blended web/email attacks at the connection level before reaching the enterprise gateway.

The technology was developed and patented by the following Engate co-founders: Dr. Haw-Minn Lu, Rich White and Dr. Alan Huang. Altogether, these 3 inventors are responsible for over 30 patents.

Engate’s proprietary network profiling approach delivers over 99% catch rate at the connection level with 1 per 1 million false positives. Unlike reputation systems that are thwarted by clean IP addresses that don’t yet have a reputation, Engate profiles both illicit and legitimate IP addresses in the entire network, and segregates legitimate mail servers from all other network hosts in order to determine the legitimacy of a sender‘s message.

By proactively profiling both clean and compromised IP addresses, Engate's global intelligence is instantly aware of new computers that become members of botnets and stops the distribution of email-borne threats at the connection level before they’re able to compromise the network.

Engate empowers OEM vendors to improve the performance, effectiveness and accuracy of their security solutions.

Engate delivers incremental value to email security, secure web gateway, unified threat management, router and intrusion prevention partners in the following ways:

(1) Enhances 3rd party scoring systems with an additional layer of network profiling analysis. Engate’s network profiling database enables OEM vendors to improve scoring systems with a variety of proprietary techniques. They include examining the source data from the envelope header, associating the IP address and the MTA with its subnet, observing IP ranges and domain names, segregating MTAs from non-MTAs, and a myriad of other criteria and human analysis to establish a profile for the entire network.

(2) Improves connection-level security and the efficiency of 3rd party email security filters by radically reducing the large volume of unwanted traffic from reaching the email gateway. Engate delivers over 99% accuracy at the connection level enabling partners to improve the effectiveness of their connection management and content scanning engines.

(3) Improves multi-layer security strategy with unique protection from known and unknown threats. Engate’s unique profiling functionality gives OEMs preemptive defense against email-borne botnets, phish, spam, viruses and other blended threats that make email the biggest network infection point.

“The rapid growth of botnets has created unprecedented demand among enterprises struggling to protect their users from virus infection, email fraud, mass spamming and malware propagation,” said Rich White, chief technology officer at Engate Technology. "Engate is leading the way in technology innovation by providing partner OEMs with a powerful network profiling technology that preemptively stops known and unknown email threats before reaching their customer’s gateway.”

Related topics:  Internet and Web security   Virus, Worm, Email security, spyware and malware 

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