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03 Apr 2003

Sophos makes it easy for OEMs and ISPs to get savvy against viruses

Latest version of Sophos Anti-Virus Interface released

Sophos, a world leader in anti-virus solutions for businesses, today announced that it has more than doubled its strategic partner network over the past year to a total of 100, as a result of the company's continued commitment to partner development. In addition, Sophos announces the immediate availability of version 3 of its third-party integration product, Sophos Anti-Virus Interface (SAVI-3). Built upon the suggestions of original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners, SAV Interface offers new ways to scan, improved resilience against attack and threat reduction capabilities whilst remaining fully backwards-compatible for Sophos's existing OEM and ISP partners.

Features in the new version of SAV Interface include the following:

  • New ways to scan, including directly from memory. This is especially useful for network services, which can start scanning as soon as the first bytes of a transaction arrive, instead of spooling the transaction to disk and then scanning.
  • Improved resilience against attack. Deliberately malformed emails and zipbombs have become common weapons amongst the counter-culture. SAVI-3 provides additional control over zipbombs and similar denial of service attacks.
  • File classification. SAVI-3 reports back not just the presence or absence of viruses, but also the types of object which were processed during the scan (e.g. ZIP, tar, gzip, MIME). This can be used to implement threat reduction mechanisms by blocking certain files by type.
  • Full backwards compatibility. The new SAVI-3 release still supports the SAVI-2-style interface. So partners who already have SAVI-compliant software or hardware can move on to the new interface at their leisure.

"Sophos has a long history as anti-virus specialists," said Nimmity Zappert, Sophos's Strategic Partnerships Manager in Sydney. "Rather than trying to be everything to everybody, Sophos chooses to partner with other security specialists to provide best-of-breed solutions for the specific needs of a particular environment. Australian partners such as myinternet Ltd, Tel.net Media and MailGuard are using Sophos's high-quality technology to enhance their products and services, and the new improvements to SAV Interface mean that integration is now easier than ever."

More information about SAV Interface.

About Sophos

More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.

Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.