Webroot Launches New Web Protection, E-Mail Archiving Products

Webroot released two products to the channel this week that its leaders believe will enable the channel to help customers better satisfy their web and e-mail risk and compliance requirements.

The first release was an update to its SaaS Web Security Service which extends the service to outbound threat detection and adds more heuristic techniques to better detect threats in real-time.

"Web security is definitely pretty hot right now in the channel," says Brian Czarny, vice president of solution marketing for Webroot. "We’re certainly seeing it from our channel partners and from a lot of potential channel partners who are taking to us right now. These new features are really important because it gives them more things they can sell around their products."

According to Czarny, the addition of outbound detection will be a key selling point for channel providers who’ve been looking for a better way to help clients identify and troubleshoot already infected machines within the network.

"Most of the current infections today, when the machine’s infected, it calls out using the web," he explains. "And so we’re able to identify that when an infected machine actually calls out and we are able to then block that and provide a report to the administrator. So that way they know which machines in their network are already compromised."

Additionally, the update also brings the channel partner a more sophisticated set of non-signature-based detection techniques to better identify threats in real-time.

"That’s really important because a lot of the threats today are very quick hitting. They’ll come out and they have a very short lifespan and they tend to be very small, targeted attacks," Czarny says. "So, signature based, like traditional antivirus signatures aren’t really as and neither is traditional web filtering. The web filtering market used to be very much driven by the use of URL lists. But that’s really not very effective because those lists can’t be updated fast enough to keep up with the newest threats."

Among these techniques are tweaked heuristics for antiphishing protection to block bad URLs even if they aren’t on a known-bad list, as well as new Javascript and shell code analysis to shut out bad website behavior.
"We’re actually looking at the page components and breaking those downs and actually analyzing what they’re supposed to do," Czarny says. "and if they’re not doing the right thing then we’re able to block those."

In addition to the update to Web Security Service, Webroot also introduced the new cloud-based E-Mail Archiving Service that it believes can be a no-brainer add-on for partners already introducing e-mail security into customer environments.

"It is such a natural extension to a partner who may already be selling e-mail security," Czarny says.
The product centralizes archived messages to enable individual users to more easily access and search their entire set of messages throughout the user’s history, as well as privileged users to search across all messages to find specific messages for compliance and business intelligence purposes.

Even though e-mail archiving has been around for a long time now, Czarny says channel partners should be looking for next-generation solutions that address a growing shift in the drivers for this market.

"We’ve really seen over the last probably two years a shift where it’s not all about compliance anymore but one of the key drivers now is really mailbox management," he says. "E-mail is just so heavily used that you have these large stores of messages sitting around your organization in different places, in .pst files and elsewhere, it makes it very difficult to find messages as you’re going through you r mailbox."