Mar 24 -- FaceTime Communications Inc., a provider of solutions that control Internet and unified communications (UC) in the enterprise, announced last week enhancements to its Greynet Enterprise Manager (GEM), including detection of malicious URLs (Uniform Resource Locator) entering the enterprise network through Skype instant messaging conversations.
Skype is encrypted using a proprietary method, making it impossible for traditional security products to view the content of a Skype text conversation. Working in partnership with Skype over the last year, FaceTime is a security vendor with the ability to examine the content of a Skype instant message, as it enters the network. Using its malware signature database maintained by FaceTime Security Labs, FaceTime's products verify that content is safe and free of malicious URL links before entering the network.
With 276 million registered business users worldwide, Skype's growing popularity and inherent cost savings have made it attractive to businesses looking to provide the advantages of presence and real-time Internet communications to their employees. Being able to protect against the threat of malware that can enter the network via something as simple as a URL in a chat screen is crucial to IT's realization of the real-time presence benefits of Skype.
FaceTime Communications enables the safe and productive use of instant messaging, web usage and unified communications platforms. FaceTime's solutions are used by large number of customers, including nine of the 10 largest U.S. banks, for security, management and compliance of real-time communications. FaceTime supports or has partnerships with public and enterprise IM network providers, including AOL, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Skype, IBM, Reuters and Jabber. FaceTime is headquartered in Belmont, California.
An add-on to FaceTime's Unified Security Gateway and IMAuditor products, GEM enables organizations to manage security policies and aggregate reporting for IM (instant messaging), P2P and malware traffic across distributed enterprise environments. By integrating with USG, GEM delivers a network-based anti-malware solution, which allows targeted remediation and repair of infected endpoints based on gateway malware detections from USG.
"Simple block or allow policies are no longer sufficient in most organizations," said Frank Cabri, vice president of marketing and product management for FaceTime. "IT managers are realizing they need to embrace the real-time communications that employees have introduced to the business environment with policies and tools to secure, control, manage, log and archive their use -- as well as their content."
Malware entering enterprise networks through real-time communications such as instant messaging and Skype costs businesses nearly US$ 289,000 annually on average, according to the 2007 survey "Greynets in the Enterprise: Third Annual Survey of Trends, Attitudes and Impact," conducted by NewDiligence Research and commissioned by FaceTime.
The survey revealed that IT managers experience nearly 39 incidents per month, on average, that require some kind of repair or remediation to end user PCs, and each repair requires, on average, about nine hours of work.
In addition to GEM-based control of in-bound URLs, FaceTime offers IT-oriented controls to manage Skype in an enterprise environment through its Unified Security Gateway appliance. Centralized policies can also be set to allow or disallow various Skype elements for the entire company, for groups or departments, or on an individual basis, including file transfer, voice calling, video calling, voicemail and voice recording.
In addition, proxy settings and listen port settings can be turned on or off for users and administrators to prevent users from broadcasting their presence online. IT can set parameters to deny users from becoming supernodes or relay nodes, and a real-time bandwidth usage indicator provides a constant measure for IT to determine Skype's impact on network traffic. GEM 3.5 is currently available.
The enhancements include detection and blocking of malicious URLs entering network via Skype IM/chat conversations insures network integrity, PC discovery via Active Directory lookup provides ease of configuration and lower administrative costs, and users can trigger remediation from their browsers on notification of inbound malware, lowering exposure to risk, reducing help desk calls, and eliminating the cost of re-imaging PCs due to infection.
The enhancements also include centralized policies may be set with localized enforcement based on IP (Internet Protocol) ranges and geographic location, lowering administrative management time and costs, URL filtering reports may be imported from USG into GEM, providing a centralized view for all channels across multiple USGs, support for Vista desktop prevents exposure to threats and lowers risk for all endpoints on the network, and support for VMware as a deployment platform provides enhanced options for architecture scalability and redundancy.
