Red Condor Bests Barracuda and Postini in Tolly Group Anti]Spam Test

Report finds Red Condor’s appliance achieved a higher spam block rate than Barracuda and Postini, and delivered performance on par with IronPort at a fraction of the price.

Rohnert Park, Calif. – April 28, 2009 – Red Condor, a leading provider of fully managed email security solutions, today announced the results of a third‐party anti‐spam effectiveness and feature comparison test that evaluated Red Condor, Barracuda Networks’ Spam Firewall 300, Google Inc.’s Message Security powered by Postini and Cisco System Inc.’s IronPort C150 Email Security Appliance (referred to hereafter as Barracuda, Postini and IronPort, respectively). The test, conducted by The Tolly Group, found that Red Condor’s Message Assurance Gateway 2700 (MAG2700) network appliance achieved a higher percentage of spam detection than Barracuda and Postini’s offerings and delivered an on par performance with the IronPort device. While finishing on par with IronPort, Red Condor’s smallest model MAG costs $4.80 per mailbox for a 500‐user scenario versus IronPort’s $23.50 per mailbox.

During the week‐long test, the MAG2700 generated one false positive in more than 190,700 inbound messages, compared with one in every 6,720 emails for the Barracuda’s Spam Firewall 300 and one in every 527 emails for Postini’s hosted service. Of the 762,962 emails processed using Red Condor’s MAG appliance, 72 spam messages were misclassified as legitimate messages for a spam block percentage of 99.991 percent. Barracuda missed 101 spam messages out of 262,088 total emails for a spam detection rate of 99.961 percent, while Postini classified 507 spam messages out of 13,187 total emails as legitimate for a spam detection rate of 95.397 percent. IronPort misclassified 102 spam messages out of 1,564,526 total emails for a spam detection rate of 99.993 percent.

“The results of The Tolly Group’s test validate what our customers and channel partners continually tell us: in terms of performance and value, we outrank the competition,” said Dr. Thomas Steding, president and chief executive officer of Red Condor. “When we entered this test, we wanted to be evaluated against the solutions that we frequently compete with, and we did not want to shy away from the biggest names in the industry. When you factor in our zero filter tuning and administration, as well as our hybrid architecture, the reviewers agreed that our appliances deliver a great value proposition. Red Condor combines powerful anti‐spam detection and a fault‐tolerant appliance at a significantly lower cost per mailbox.”

“With any of our tests, it is important that we put the solutions through practical use to show how they would perform under real‐world conditions,” stated Kevin Tolly from The Tolly Group.

“As we evaluated the four anti‐spam solutions, it was clear to us which solutions were outperforming the others, particularly in the areas of overall spam filtering, and false negatives and positives. Of course, cost is a major factor in today’s economic climate, so companies are looking to get performance for a great price. Red Condor combines low cost and control of an onsite appliance with the proactive monitoring and reliability of a hosted service.”

According to the test report, “Tolly engineers tested all platforms with a live E‐mail stream of messages in order to test the capabilities and behavior of each product when they were deployed in a live network.”

Testing was conducted in accordance with the Tolly Common RFP #1058 “Anti‐Spam Gateway v1.0.” See CommonRFP.com for more details. All the appliances were configured behind the corporate firewall and quarantine features were enabled. The LDAP query feature in each solution was used to run recipient verification on The Tolly Group’s Active Directory server and each system was reset to factory settings prior to testing. All inbound email messages during a seven‐day period were scanned for possible spam. Testing was conducted in succession beginning with Postini, followed by Barracuda, IronPort and then Red Condor.

To Purchase Red Condor Products Visit http://www.redprotector.com

Red Condor Enhances Spam‐Fighting Capabilities with Latest Software Update

Red Condor introduces False Positive Quarantine Miner and Spam Trip Wire, to identify spam and phishing campaigns faster and more accurately than ever Rohnert Park, Calif. – April 7, 2009 – In its effort to stay steps ahead of spammers, Red Condor, the award‐winning provider of fully managed email security solutions, today introduced new spam‐fighting capabilities as part of its 6.1 software release. The update includes new false positive reduction capabilities, spam and phishing campaign monitoring techniques and enhanced keyword filtering, in addition to new branding and administrative features. Red Condor provides anti‐spam technology through its family of Message Assurance Gateway (MAG) network appliances and Hosted Service, which can be combined to provide fault‐tolerance through data center backup for true hybrid messaging assurance.

The recently released capabilities include the following:
• False Positive Quarantine Miner – The proprietary Miner combs through previously quarantined
messages looking for good email. These potential false positives are reported to the Red Condor
system for reprocessing and possible release of the message and deactivation of the rule that
caught the message.
• Spam Trip Wire – New proprietary campaign monitoring technique that quickly identifies spam
and phishing campaigns before they penetrate users’ networks. Suspicious campaigns are put
on probation until a filter rule can be written to capture messages from the campaign. During
the probationary period, messages referring to the suspicious campaign are quarantined.
• Keyword Filtering – Enhanced keyword filtering capabilities allow administrators to create Word
lists to be used for both inbound and outbound filtering to quarantine messages based upon
criteria such as obscenity, financial information or intellectual property.

“Most anti‐spam solutions simply fail at preventing false positives, which are a major pain point for businesses and consumers,” said Dr. Thomas Steding, CEO of Red Condor. “Red Condor is the only true hybrid, next generation solution provider that uses multiple feedback loops and continuous learning on false positives to enhance our solution. Our customers have come to expect near perfect anti‐spam block rates and near zero false positives. With ongoing enhancements like our False Positives Quarantine Miner, we continue to stay ahead of the cybercriminals and maintain our system’s accuracy and innovation.”

To learn more about Red Condor’s anti‐spam solutions, please visit Red Condor’s booth number 333 at the RSA Conference 2009 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, April 20‐24, 2009. Media and analysts can also schedule briefings with Dr. Steding during the conference by emailing kwilson@kwprinc.com.

To Purchase Red Condor Products Visit http://www.redprotector.com

Report Says Spam Arms Race Escalating

The bad guys are recovering from the loss of McColo and learning how to prevent being taken down so easily again.

March 16, 2009
By Alex Goldman

Just four months ago, the world enjoyed a brief reduction in spam with the closure of McColo, a U.S.-based Web host that was accused of being a major hub for spammer activity, including a massive botnet called Srbizi.

Within less than one month, traffic began to bounce back and spammers had redesigned their new botnets to incorporate the lessons learned from the shut down of Srbizi.

"It was a question of when, rather than if, spammers would be back up after McColo was taken down," Zulflika Ramzan, technical director at Symantec, told InternetNews.com at the time.

The rising tide of spam since then is now clearly visible, most experts say. "In October, spam volume was 200 billion messages per day," said Nilesh Bandhari, product manager at Cisco's security appliance subsidiary IronPort Systems. "After McColo, it was down to 100 to 120 billion per day. Now spam volume has started to return, to about 140 to 150 billion messages per day.

The longer term view is more bleak. "Overall, between 2003 and 2008, we've seen the volume of worldwide spam increase exponentially, from 10 trillion to 53 trillion [per year] thanks in large part to the use of botnets," wrote Dr. Thomas Steding, president and CEO of e-mail security company Red Condor in response to an e-mail query. "We anticipate by 2013 that volume will again grow exponentially as will the business costs of trying to manage the problem,"

The percentage of all e-mail that is spam alone is stunning. "Spam was 73.3 percent of all e-mail in February," said Paul Wood, senior analyst at Symantec's hosted e-mail security provider MessageLabs.

But not everyone agrees that the volume of spam is increasing. "Actually, from what we see, spam levels are staying more or less the same," wrote David Skoll, president and CEO of e-mail filtering company Roaring Penguin Software, to InternetNews.com. "It continues to be an annoying problem for some, and a very serious problem for many."
Liable to worsen

Expect more spam later this year. IronPort's Bandhari said that botnet owners are building vast bot armies with the capability of sending even more spam but are not yet using them to their full capacity. "We see two or three botnets that are set up but not fully monetized yet," he said. "There have been some spam and malware attacks hosted from there, but they are trying to stay under the radar."

MessageLabs' Wood said that several botnets are competing with each other, and he named a few of them: Xarvester, Cutwail and Mega-D. He added that Mega-D may have competed too hard.

"Mega-D became number one, sending 40 percent of spam, with fewer nodes working harder. But over a period of time, ISPs and others can block those addresses, so as a long-term tactic, making bots work harder is not viable," said Wood.

Shutting down these bots will not be as easy as it was with McColo. The next generation of botnet is designed to make that impossible. "In order to avoid another McColo, malware authors are using different command and control techniques," said Wood.

One longstanding technique is to use an IRC (define) channel. All the bots log into a chat room and wait for an instruction, which is usually to go to a Web site, download a program, and run it. But the bots have hard coded information that reveals the location of the command and control network, so you can identify the location of the chat room and disrupt the botnet.

These more sophisticated botnets run like peer-to-peer networks, with no central command and control. "Each bot learns from other bots, and instructions cascade through the network," said Wood.

Even if you could identify a choke point, it would be difficult to act on the information in a timely manner. Bandwidth providers cannot act fast and on a whim. They need to be careful, as privacy expert Ray Everett-Church explained in an article on InternetNews.com at the time of the McColo shut down.

Bandwidth providers need compelling proof to act because they must honor the contracts they have signed. "I can certainly empathize with the sentiment of 'unplug first and ask questions later,' but the number of occasions in which that is the appropriate response are far fewer than you might think," Everett-Church wrote.

To Purchase Red Condor Products Visit http://www.redprotector.com

Red Condor 6.0

Block Outgoing Spam

Even scarier than the idea that your company’s network has been infected is the possibility that it might be sending out spam, phishing email, or malware without your knowledge. Customers may implicitly trust messages from your organization, but that trust will suffer if you can’t control what comes out of your company.

Version 6.0 of the software behind Red Condor’s hosted security service provides you with powerful, optional outbound filtering of spam, viruses, and phishing attacks, as well as the inbound protection that built the service’s reputation. System administrators will be kept in the loop on network activity and can limit the number of messages each account can send per hour.

You have more branding options with Red Condor 6.0, too. Enhancements to its Admin Dashboard let you customize the browser interface with your organization’s own brand. In addition, the Admin Dashboard now offers configuration settings for authentication and advanced discovery.

Version 6.0 also forms the foundation of Red Condor’s MAG (Message Assurance Gateway) network appliances. The software lets you see current and historical traffic through an appliance cluster, including ones licensed for the company’s Vx Technology. Vx lets your cluster failover to Red Condor’s hosted service in case traffic surpasses peak load capacity, and is also key to your business’s continued operation in case of a power outage, a malicious attack, or problems with the network.

To Purchase Red Condor Products Visit http://www.redprotector.com

Red Condor Anti-Spam

Using both an appliance at the ISP and a hosted system, Red Condor claims more detailed analysis, less management costs, and competitive pricing for a system being sold aggressively to ISPs.

Rohnert Park, Calif.-based anti-spam company Red Condor was founded in 2002. Why would anyone want to enter a market with several hundred competitors?

"I and two other guys were just finishing off some consulting work," explains Jeff Aguilera, the company's founder. "We were doing analytical charts for investors and were looking for the next big opportunity in that field. During this period, my spam problem got worse and worse. It got to 40 or 50 each day (though now that doesn't seem so bad)."

"So I asked our e-mail tech to activate all the anti-spam filters, all the RBLs, and I had no spam for three or four hours, and I sent him an e-mail thanking him for solving the problem. The next morning, I found that my e-mail had been blocked as spam. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out which filters should be active and which not, and nothing worked really well."

He decided there was an opportunity.

Technology
A successful company requires good technology and good marketing. For years, Red Condor has been focusing on the technology, and only recently hired a new CEO, Thomas Steding, the founding CEO of PGP, to improve the company's marketing and PR.

"I was attracted to this position because the company is taking a good approach," he says.

Red Condor's solution involves both an appliance and a hosted solution. The company calls it "hybrid."

"We have developed about 1.3 million rules," says Aguilera, "but there are never more than 30,000 or 40,000 active at any time. In comparison, the typical anti-virus engine might be applying 80,000 rules evolved over 20 years. We're 50 times that scale after 5 years, and that's because the spam problem is similar to the virus problem, but evolves at a faster pace."

With both a hosted system and an appliance, the hosted system can act as backup, notes Steding, handling all of the load if the box fails, or just the overflow if the mail system is attacked and experiences a massive e-mail peak.

Marketing
Red Condor is going after the install base of Postini and Barracuda, says Steding. "The reputation of Postini has gone through the floor since its acquisition by Google," he says.

He touts "the deepest and most extensive filter process on the market, and probably the fastest time to deployment of rules when a new campaign is detected—minutes!—and a blockage rate higher than anybody else."

He claims the company's pricing is comparable to Postini and Barracuda, with a greater ease of management that delivers cost savings.

Christy Kenyon, marketing communication manager at Red Condor, delivers a fistful of case studies that hammer home the point.

Geneseo Telephone Company of Geneseo, Il. switched from Postini. Waitsfield, Vt.-based Green Mountain Access looked at Barracuda, Symantec, and Postini but chose Red Condor. Hebron, Ind.-based NetNITCO, in business since 1996, recently abandoned its home grown solution for Red Condor.

Eden Prairie, Minn.-based VISI was using both Barracuda and Postini and switched to Red Condor. Red Condor's case study (.pdf) quotes Jason Baker, VISI's CTO, as saying, "we were not happy with the performance of the Barracuda spam firewalls . . . once Google decided to raise our prices by 30 percent, we knew it would be a good time to conduct a technology survey."

Expect to hear more from Red Condor. "For the first few years, we were three or four guys in a garage," says Aguilera. "It was slow organic growth. We had a reliable base of cutomers, some success in the muni market, especially in Northern California, but it was not until 2007 that we decided to try to get to the next level. We obtained angel and then venture financing and now we've got a new CEO in place and a new marketing team. We're saying, 'hey, we exist and we think we do a pretty damn good job. Take a look!'"

To Purchase Red Condor Products Visit http://www.redprotector.com

Red Condor Swoops Down On Spam

February 17, 2009

Company: Red Condor

Headquarters: Rohnert Park, Calif.

Technology Sector: Security

Key Product: Message Assurance Gateway

Year Founded: 2003

Number of Channel Partners: 135 in North America

Ideal Channel Partner: Midmarket-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: Red Condor's e-mail security software—available via a network appliance or as a hosted service—promises protection against spam, viruses, identity theft and other security plagues.

The Lowdown: Security vendor Red Condor isn't content to filter out spam messages from a user's inbox. The company doesn't want them arriving in the first place and is hoping VARs feel the same way.

Red Condor offers a hosted service, as well as an appliance for customers that want more control of their e-mail on premise. Rather than relying solely on a search for forbidden words, the company says its

Red Condor Message Assurance Gateway
technology requires messages to pass through consecutive layers of SMTP session-level defenses, content analysis, virus detection, sender profiling and other filtering before reaching the recipient's inbox. Another feature is outbound filtering, which helps identify if a PC has been hijacked and is sending out spam illegally.

Version 6.0 of its e-mail security software, recently released, provides greater configuration control of security and advanced discovery features, and gives hosted service customers the option to filter outbound messages.

"E-mail filtering has gone from 'I don't want the junk' to 'My computer may be part of an illegal network spamming the world.' It's a serious concern, and your network can be blacklisted by ISPs that take it very seriously," said Chris Gardner, director of channel development at Red Condor.

Blacklisting is of particular concern to customers using shared co-location services to house their infrastructure, Gardner said.

"They could be blacklisted when it's someone else on the e-mail server doing it," he said. "If you get blacklisted, it's not a 20-minute phone call with the ISP [to clear it up]. It can take days, and the cost to companies can be astounding."

Red Condor offers a three-tier channel program, with discounts of 20 percent, 27 percent and 35 percent for the bronze, silver and gold levels, respectively. There's also a registration program where VARs can sign customers up for a 30-day trial and then have protection on that client from competitors.

Many of Red Condor's current partners focus on Web consulting, so the company now is looking to add more full-service security-focused solution providers. "I want to extend my channel to partners that are selling firewalls, Web filtering solutions and are a technical adviser for their clients. That's a piece Red Condor has not focused on," Gardner said.

Mike Kane, owner of WorkgroupIT, a Los Gatos, Calif.-based solution provider, said Red Condor's technology is sound.

"The differentiation that was important to me was the distinction between [blocking] spam [using] filtering vs. using a honeypot technology that knows it's a spammer," Kane said. "An e-mail may have a key word, but it may not be spam at all. The honeypot technology is based on Red Condor detecting and knowing who the spammers are and blocking them before they can deliver the mail, which is more productive for the end user."

KLH Consulting started selling Red Condor in 2006 after trying several antispam solutions, said Stephanie Garzoli, operations manager at the Santa Rosa, Calif.-based solution provider.

"Productivity improves for our clients as a direct result of receiving far fewer unwanted e-mails, some estimate upward of 90 percent," she said. "Unlike some competitive appliances, there is virtually no management time required once Red Condor is properly configured."

To Purchase Red Condor Products Visit http://www.redprotector.com

To Purchase Red Condor Products Visit http://www.redprotector.com

Red Condor Swoops Down On Spam

February 17, 2009

Company: Red Condor

Headquarters: Rohnert Park, Calif.

Technology Sector: Security

Key Product: Message Assurance Gateway

Year Founded: 2003

Number of Channel Partners: 135 in North America

Ideal Channel Partner: Midmarket-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: Red Condor's e-mail security software—available via a network appliance or as a hosted service—promises protection against spam, viruses, identity theft and other security plagues.

The Lowdown: Security vendor Red Condor isn't content to filter out spam messages from a user's inbox. The company doesn't want them arriving in the first place and is hoping VARs feel the same way.

Red Condor offers a hosted service, as well as an appliance for customers that want more control of their e-mail on premise. Rather than relying solely on a search for forbidden words, the company says its

Red Condor Message Assurance Gateway
technology requires messages to pass through consecutive layers of SMTP session-level defenses, content analysis, virus detection, sender profiling and other filtering before reaching the recipient's inbox. Another feature is outbound filtering, which helps identify if a PC has been hijacked and is sending out spam illegally.

Version 6.0 of its e-mail security software, recently released, provides greater configuration control of security and advanced discovery features, and gives hosted service customers the option to filter outbound messages.

"E-mail filtering has gone from 'I don't want the junk' to 'My computer may be part of an illegal network spamming the world.' It's a serious concern, and your network can be blacklisted by ISPs that take it very seriously," said Chris Gardner, director of channel development at Red Condor.

Blacklisting is of particular concern to customers using shared co-location services to house their infrastructure, Gardner said.

"They could be blacklisted when it's someone else on the e-mail server doing it," he said. "If you get blacklisted, it's not a 20-minute phone call with the ISP [to clear it up]. It can take days, and the cost to companies can be astounding."

Red Condor offers a three-tier channel program, with discounts of 20 percent, 27 percent and 35 percent for the bronze, silver and gold levels, respectively. There's also a registration program where VARs can sign customers up for a 30-day trial and then have protection on that client from competitors.

Many of Red Condor's current partners focus on Web consulting, so the company now is looking to add more full-service security-focused solution providers. "I want to extend my channel to partners that are selling firewalls, Web filtering solutions and are a technical adviser for their clients. That's a piece Red Condor has not focused on," Gardner said.

Mike Kane, owner of WorkgroupIT, a Los Gatos, Calif.-based solution provider, said Red Condor's technology is sound.

"The differentiation that was important to me was the distinction between [blocking] spam [using] filtering vs. using a honeypot technology that knows it's a spammer," Kane said. "An e-mail may have a key word, but it may not be spam at all. The honeypot technology is based on Red Condor detecting and knowing who the spammers are and blocking them before they can deliver the mail, which is more productive for the end user."

KLH Consulting started selling Red Condor in 2006 after trying several antispam solutions, said Stephanie Garzoli, operations manager at the Santa Rosa, Calif.-based solution provider.

"Productivity improves for our clients as a direct result of receiving far fewer unwanted e-mails, some estimate upward of 90 percent," she said. "Unlike some competitive appliances, there is virtually no management time required once Red Condor is properly configured."

To Purchase Red Condor Products Visit http://www.redprotector.com

To Purchase Red Condor Products Visit http://www.redprotector.com