The level of threat that Internet users are exposed to continues to grow each quarter.

Earlier this week, Commtouch released Q4 2009 Internet Threats Trend Report, a 20-page document describing what the reality of Internet security is circa late 2009. Highlights of the document include:

• 312,000 zombies were activated on average each day of the quarter
• Spam levels ranged between 68% (late December) and 98% (in November), averaging at 77% throughout the quarter
• One proficient virus masqueraded in emails coming from Facebook, DHL, UPS, the government etc.
• For a sample malware (Mal-Bredo A), the time difference between it being revealed in the Commtouch security labs and other antivirus vendors was 11.77h (Microsoft), 25.88h (Kaspersky), and even larger than 98h (Symantec, TrendMicro)

If you want to take advantage of Commtouch’s international network of malware detection, one simple answer would be the new Total Email Protection service that accompanies our Syneto UTM, which will be available starting with version 1.3.0 of our product.

Release date: early February 2010.

Seeing as how this is the first post of the year, please allow me to wish all of you a great 2010, may it be better than the year we just ended.

I’ve been really quiet during the last few months, as we’ve been very busy developing, but this time I have some great news to share with you.

October last year we signed a strategic agreement with Commtouch – one of the leading providers of global email and web threat intelligence, with thousands of clients in over 190 countries. What does that mean for the Syneto family of products? It means that the level of detection of our email protection engines gained a great performance boost, effectively transforming us in a top competitor in the email security market.

Why are we announcing this only now? We wanted to wait until we were really close to releasing a product with the new technology incorporated, and that product is the next generation of our Syneto UTM – version 1.3.0, in which we integrated the Commtouch Antispam, Antivirus and IP reputation engines, along with a lot of other great enhancements to our product. I will blog more on the technical details in the following days, but I am sure you will be amazed by the progress we made.

The good news is the new version is pretty close to release, as we are entering the RELEASE CANDIDATE phase at the beginning of next week (January 18th). That means we will be releasing the final version in the first days of February. Meanwhile, if you would like to take part in the evaluation of the RELEASE CANDIDATE, please send me an email at flavius(at)syneto(dot)net and I will gladly help you obtain a copy.