SpyWall Takes Top Security Honors

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Edging out its closest competitor, Trlokom, Inc.’s SpyWall took top honors in the Enterprise Security category of Datamation’s Product of the Year 2006 awards.

SpyWall, the newly anointed flagship product for the five-year-old company, outdistanced the second-place finisher, eSoft, Inc.’s ThreatWall. Digital Defense, Inc.’s Frontline V3.2 came in third, with eIQnetworks, Inc. coming in a close fourth with its Enterprise Security Analyzer. Rounding out the top five was Pointsec for PC 6.0 from Pointsec Mobile Technologies, Inc.

SpyWall is designed to protect client-side applications. This first version of the security product is focused on protecting the browser, but an upcoming version, expected late this year, will be designed to add in protection for email and instant messaging software, according to Jayant Shukla, founder of Trlokom, which is based in Monrovia, Calif.

”There are so many security companies out there doing the same things,” said Shukla, who adds that the young company is building on about 20 customers right now. ”There are maybe 70 companies trying for an anti-spyware solution. We said forget about spyware. Let’s focus on the attack vector, and that’s application access. You need protection against all those types of attacks.”

Shukla said they decided to focus on protecting the browser first because it’s such a highly targeted attack vector.

”Most attacks come in through the browser,” he added, citing a recent TrendMicro survey that showed 85 percent of attacks use the browser. ”It’s the big source of problems. We knew we needed to get to that first, and then move on to email and IM.”

And that was a good call, according to Joe Wilcox, a senior analyst for JupiterResearch.

”The browser is the big tunnel,” he says. ”It’s the most obvious point of entry for a hacker.”

While Wilcox says the application security space is heating up, he’s also surprised at how few companies are working in this area today.

”It’s hugely needed,” he adds. ”If you look at the trend over the last five years or so, as companies fortified the perimeter with firewalls and other security, the hackers moved on to the application layer. In the earlier days of application attacks, we saw the Outlook viruses, like Melissa. Now, the larger concern is what I call the big tunnel into every business, which is Port 80 — Web browser access… With businesses connected to the Internet and many applications directly connecting to the Internet, the risk profile increases.”

The network manager of a San Francisco-based investment real estate company says they started using SpyWall back when it was in beta to better battle these new risks to the client… and to the network.

The manager, who asked that he and his company not be named in this story, said he went with SpyWall — over LavaSoft’s Ad-Aware and Spybot by Safer-Networking Ltd. — because it gives him the ability to centrally manage the security on his client machines — inside and outside of the main office.

”I thought this looked better than all the bits and pieces we had been buying before,” he said. ”We want to help end users by setting up trusted websites and pushing updates out to everybody. I like a one-stop-shop kind of product.”

And the network manager says SpyWall is keeping the company’s desktops and laptops much cleaner than they used to be.

”Before we were cleaning up maybe four or five machines a week, and we got a lot of repeat customers… People would surf a website and we’d have to clean out spyware and whatever weird little things had been loaded on their machines,” he added. ”Since we installed SpyWall, it’s really dropped off a lot.

”It’s saving me a lot of time in terms of having to go out to these machines,” he says, noting that he’s looking forward to the upcoming version that will add email protection.