Contact Information: Press Relations: David Oro Oro Group Phone: 707-558-8585 david@orogroup.com Suzanne Matick Oro Group Phone: 831-479-1888 suzanne@matick.net Analyst Relations: Liz Landis Cisco/IronPort Phone: 415-828-4801 liz@ironport.com Investor Relations: Marisa Ross Cisco Systems, Inc. Phone: 408-527-9830 email: mariross@cisco.com
Cisco Stops Spam With Increased Performance From Intel
Intel Multi-Core Processors Power Next-Generation IronPort Content Security Systems
| Source: Cisco Systems, Inc.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - September 18, 2007) - IronPort® Systems, a business unit of
Cisco® (NASDAQ : CSCO ), today announced the use of Multi-core Intel®
Xeon® processors to power IronPort's next generation of email and Web
security appliances. IronPort appliances use AsyncOS, a proprietary
operating system that is taking full advantage of the significant
performance increases made possible by Intel Multi-core technology. This
performance improvement helps enterprises, Internet service providers
(ISPs) and smaller organizations stay ahead of the never-ending deluge of
spam e-mail.
Spam, Spam, Spam, and More Spam
According to IronPort's SenderBase, the world's first and largest email
traffic monitoring service, the volume of spam has been roughly doubling
every year, with no end in sight. As of August 2007, the IronPort business
unit measured an 18 percent month-over-month increase in spam volume. It
is estimated that more than 90 percent of all email is spam. More than 80
percent of spam comes from infected "zombie" computers, typically in
consumer broadband networks. As spam filters become more effective and
more widely deployed, a spammer simply sends more messages with the hope
that enough will get through spam filters to make the spammer's business
profitable.
Spam Gets Smarter
In addition to the brute-force tactic of doubling spam volumes
year-over-year, spammers have adopted a variety of techniques to bypass
traditional filters. Spammers have migrated from simple text messages to
HTML messages to image-based spam. The latest variant is known as
attachment spam, where spam messages are embedded into popular attachment
types such as Adobe PDF or Microsoft Excel files. This poses additional
burdens for spam filters because the average spam message size has
increased from approximately 3 kilobytes Kbytes in 2005 to 40 kilobytes in
2007. Not only are the messages larger, but they also require much more
computer processing at the perimeter to interpret the new attachments and
distinguish spam from legitimate mail. The combination of exponential
growth in message volumes coupled with larger messages and more required
processing per message has caused many traditional anti-spam systems to
struggle to keep up -- these end users will see more spam getting past the
filters and into their inbox, and may experience delays in sending and
receiving mail.
Staying in Front
The new generation of email security appliances from IronPort harnesses the
power of Multi-core Intel Xeon processors to stay in front of new spammer
tactics. The IronPort X1050 uses dual Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor 5300
series. The IronPort AsyncOS operating system is able to take full
advantage of all eight cores, yielding system throughput approximately 800
percent greater than a comparable single-core appliance. This increase in
processing power allows the IronPort appliance not only to process more
spam messages, but also to run more sophisticated rules and analysis to
thwart the latest spam techniques.
Spam continues and as a result, spam filters cannot simply rely on faster
hardware to keep pace. The work that Cisco and Intel have been doing with
multi-core systems is a great example of the new technologies required to
stay ahead of spam.
Available Now
IronPort X1050 and all multi-core systems are available now. Visit
www.ironport.com for more details.
About Cisco
Cisco (NASDAQ : CSCO ) is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms
how people connect, communicate and collaborate. Information about Cisco
can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go to
http://newsroom.cisco.com.
Cisco, the Cisco logo and Cisco Systems are registered trademarks or
trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United
States and certain other countries. All other trademarks mentioned in this
document are the property of their respective owners. This document is
Cisco Public Information.
For direct RSS Feeds of all Cisco news, please visit "News@Cisco" at the
following link:
http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/rss.html