Symantec rolls out first IM product

3 April  2006
By Dan Muse

It was only a matter of time before the big security vendors got serious about instant messaging. In January, Symantec Corp. enter the game when it anted up by purchasing IM Logic.

Today, Symantec announced the first product of that acquisition — Symantec IM Manager 8.0, the latest version of the erstwhile IM Logic's management and security product.

IM threats now travel on a two-way street. In addition to battling worms, spam, viruses, phishing and other unwanted content, IM Manager 8.0 also is designed to provide integrated management and compliance archiving for corporate policy enforcement regulatory compliance requirements including Sarbanes Oxley and Gramm Leach Bliley. "The pipe goes both ways," Symantec's Jon Sakoda, "bad things can come in and good things can go out."

While in the past, he said, IT managers were scrambling against inbound threats, now they're scrambling to stop workers from transmitting text and files. "We've seen more incidents of people committing sins — good people doing bad things."

"The majority of security problems occur over public IM, which are the dominant platforms," Sakoda told InstantMessagingPlanet.com. (Sakoda was formerly IMLogic's chief technology officer). IM Manager 8.0 offers support for all major public networks, including AOL Instant Messenger, GoogleTalk, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo! Messenger. While GoogleTalk doesn't boast the same number of users as IM's Big three, "it's here to stay and customers are requesting support, Sakoda said.

In addition to the large consumer IM networks, IM Manager 8.0 also work with enterprise IM offerings such as Microsoft's Live Communications Server, IBM's Lotus Sametime and Jabber.

Symantec cites IDC estimates that enterprise IM will grow from 40 million users today to more than 140 million by 2009. With that type of growth, IT managers have a sense of urgency when it comes to compliance and network security threats.

"In 2005, many companies woke up to the IM threat," Sakoda said. He added that in 2004, IM Logic reported dozens of IM-delivered viruses and worms. In 2005, the number was in the hundreds. "It's growing exponentially."  

According to the most recent Symantec Internet Security Threat Report, worms were the preferred type of malicious code on all three large IM networks in the second half of 2005, representing 91 percent of IM-related malicious code during this period.

One of the goals of IM Manager 8.0, Sakoda said, is to broaden management beyond text and urls to include VoIP, video cams and games. Symantec also focused on integrating signature-based and with predictive measures to thwart zero-day attacks. "Signature-based is reactive and it's not enough," Sakoda said. Instead, enterprise need to take a layered approach. "Protection is different with IM. Threats are real-time." Symantec IM Manager 8.0 provides what Symantec said is the industry's only behavior-based and network anomaly monitoring system, which is designed to preempt IM threat outbreaks.

Symantec IM Manager 8.0 can now be configured for integration with Symantec Enterprise Vault, an e-mail compliance archiving product and part of the Enterprise Messaging Management solution portfolio.

Source: http://www.instantmessagingplanet.com/enterprise/article.php/3596241