P-Cube Releases Zombie-Killing Tool For Service Providers

P-Cube has announced a new weapon in service providers' ongoing war against hackers and spammers. The Sunnyvale, CA-based IP service control solutions vendor, soon to be owned by Cisco, has enhanced the security features of its Engage v2.1 service application to detect and defend against spam zombies.

These attacks are a growing menace for service providers and their subscribers. Hackers and spammers use the attacks to infect host systems with Trojan horses, programs that can distribute more spam or be used in distributed denial of service attacks. Up to 80 per cent of all spam originates from spam zombies, making them a significant cause of storage, bandwidth and productivity loss says P-Cube CEO and president Yuval Shahar.

"Augmenting our industry-leading P2P solution, Engage adds security capabilities to our existing service control technology with DDoS and spam protection," Shahar said in a statement. "Our service control technology gives service providers, for the first time, the ability to eliminate the threat posed by legions of spam zombies without disrupting network performance, allowing providers to manage their networks for advanced services delivery."

Engage can now identify zombie attacks in their early phases. It uses deep packet inspection at levels 4-7 and maintains state, allowing it to differentiate between single large e-mail messages and the multitudes of minute messages generated as multiple independent messages that characterize zombie spam attacks. Having identified the suspicious traffic, Engage immediately reports the attack and can be set to automatically quarantine the spam.

Service provider subscribers are typically unaware that they have been victims of zombie spam attacks. However, Engage's notification feature will automatically inform them of the problem and direct them to support help desks to take the appropriate corrective measures.The currently shipping version of Engage v2.1 features the new anti-spam features. Cisco Systems Inc. announced its acquisition of P-Cube in August, with the deal expected to close by the end of this month.