Tumbleweed Unveils Intelligent Data Leak Prevention and Real-Time Botnet Defense

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Tumbleweed® Communications Corp. (NASDAQ: TMWD), the industry's leading pure play messaging security vendor, today announced new MailGate® capabilities that will dramatically reduce accidental email data leaks and botnet driven threats. Featuring the security industry’s first multi-layered perimeter defense, MailGate’s new capabilities arm customers with unrivaled end-to-end security and dramatically reduce the cost and complexity associated with email messaging security.

“In today’s enterprise, employees, even with the best intentions, often inadvertently leak sensitive information via email - customer or employee information, regulated content, or intellectual property”

According to IDC’s Security Survey, 2006, employee error is now the fourth largest security concern in the enterprise, behind malware, spyware and spam. In fact, the vast majority of accidental data leaks are by well-intentioned employees via email – and they are far more prevalent than malicious attacks.

“Every enterprise wants to keep confidential data from leaking into the wrong hands. But most content filtering solutions are extremely expensive and overly complex – and all they do is identify the problem,” said Daniel Greenberg, chief marketing officer at Tumbleweed. “With Tumbleweed’s MailGate, we provide CIOs with a full email messaging solution – it identifies the problem and then automatically takes action quickly and easily, based on their unique needs and policies.”

Similarly, concerns around spam – and specifically, botnets – continue to mount. Zombie emails account for more than 85 percent of spam and the volume of spam has risen by 100 percent over the last six months.

“Tumbleweed understands our need to stay ahead of email based threats, inbound and outbound, while deploying a product that is easy to use,” said Gregory Van Den Ham, information technology manager at M3 Capital Partners. “With MailGate 3.5’s new functionality, even with rising spam and virus levels, Tumbleweed’s Edge defense technologies reliably keep spam and associated malware off the network freeing our network administrators to handle other tasks while keeping our email systems efficient. And email compliance monitoring has become far more simplified due to unparalleled policy controls and checkbox content filtering capabilities.”

MailGate 3.5 features innovative defense capabilities on both fronts to address these widespread concerns.

End-to-End Data Leak Protection

To date, data leak and content filtering products have often lacked the direct integration with email policies and encryption needed to prevent accidents. Enterprises have universally been plagued by cost and complexity, requiring complex data categorization and hundreds of thousands of dollars to conduct basic outbound filtering.

“In today’s enterprise, employees, even with the best intentions, often inadvertently leak sensitive information via email - customer or employee information, regulated content, or intellectual property,” says Brian Burke, research analysts at IDC. “Organizations should invest in technologies that enforce corporate policies, stop data leaks and provide secure delivery of sensitive messages.”

The new MailGate capabilities extend data leak and content filtering functionality to enforce multiple policy actions on messages containing sensitive information based on user context, corporate rules and delivery methods like encryption. This new functionality goes beyond the limited reporting capabilities of other content filtering vendors, yet at a fraction of the complexity and cost. Through innovation of the user interface, the new MailGate automatically filters certain confidential information, including specific credit card, social security, and CUSIP (banking/trading) numbers with a simple checkbox, making the enforcement of policies surrounding this data a best practice. The interface also provides extensive lexicons of financial, healthcare and offensive terms, with flexible word-weighting for granular control over a wide range of regulated information. Additionally, MailGate’s content filters can scan all inbound and outbound messages, and more than 300 types of attachments, including binary and nested files. To further protect data, MailGate also provides policy-based TLS encryption.

Real-Time Botnet Detection

MailGate offers a critical new defense against the growing problem of botnets – armies of hijacked ‘zombie’ computers, used for distributed spam and virus attacks. Botnets have been particularly effective against antispam products that rely heavily on IP reputation databases. By hijacking new IP addresses without established reputations, botnets are often able to elude detection – delivering spam from distributed locations, and stealing new IP addresses when existing ones are identified.

MailGate solves this problem with an innovative approach that combines a global network of over 100 million IP addresses, real-time updates, and pattern detection from more than 50,000 end-points across the Internet. Unlike competing systems, MailGate can correlate distributed attacks and drop connections from newly hijacked IPs – even if they don’t have an existing negative reputation. This is combined with MailGate’s extensive MailGate Edge™ defense capabilities blocking directory harvest attacks, email denial of service attacks, and invalid recipients – often eliminating 90 percent or more of raw email traffic before it overwhelms the network. And MailGate’s extensive layers of spam content and image filtering assure the highest levels of spam capture with negligible false positives.

Streamlined Management

The MailGate user interface has been redesigned to streamline management and improve control, reducing cost and complexity. MailGate has devised a task-based interface, minimizing the steps required to perform important tasks. Security policies are simple to create and enforce with logical “IF/THEN” conditions, including checkboxes for common content filtering requirements, such as credit card and Social Security numbers. Simple message tracking, along with automated and scheduled reporting, provide clarity and management visibility.

Pricing and Availability

The newest MailGate capabilities will be available exclusively on MailGate Appliance™. MailGate 3.5 is anticipated to be available from Tumbleweed and select channel partners in late July 2007 with prices starting around $5000.

About the Tumbleweed MailGate Product Suite

The Tumbleweed MailGate Product Suite is a family of products for protecting, filtering and monitoring corporate email, blocking more than 99 percent of inbound spam. These best-in-breed products enable businesses to manage inbound and outbound traffic, block threats, encrypt messages and block data leaks. MailGate products include MailGate Appliance, MailGate Email Firewall™ software and MailGate Secure Messenger™ software, each optimized for specific environments and security challenges.

SAFE HARBOR STATEMENT

Tumbleweed cautions that forward-looking statements contained in this press release are based on plans and expectations as of the date of the press release, and that a number of factors could cause the actual results to differ materially from the guidance given at this time. These factors are described in the Safe Harbor statement below.

Except for the historical information contained herein, the matters discussed in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected, particularly with respect to the availability, performance, functionality, and pricing of Tumbleweed’s MailGate Appliance 3.5 product. In some cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as “may,” “will,” “should,” “potential,” “continue,” “expects,” “anticipates,” “intends,” “plans,” “believes,” “estimates,” and similar expressions. For further cautions about the risks of investing in Tumbleweed, we refer you to the documents Tumbleweed files from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, particularly Tumbleweed’s Form 10-K filed March 14, 2007 and Form 10-Q filed May 10, 2007.

Tumbleweed assumes no obligation to update information contained in this press release. Although this release may remain available on Tumbleweed’s website or elsewhere, its continued availability does not indicate that Tumbleweed is reaffirming or confirming any of the information contained herein.

About Tumbleweed

Tumbleweed Communications Corp. (NASDAQ:TMWD), the industry’s leading pure play messaging security vendor, provides world-class innovative messaging security solutions for organizations of all sizes. Organizations rely on Tumbleweed's solutions to securely manage their Internet communications, spanning email management to file transfers. Tumbleweed has nearly 2,700 customers worldwide, representing industries such as Finance, Healthcare, and the U.S. Government. The world’s most security conscious organizations rely upon Tumbleweed technology including Bank of America Securities, JP Morgan Chase & Co., the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the U.S. Department of Defense. Our award-winning products build on fourteen years of R&D and 26 security patents in the U.S. alone – many of which are licensed by other security vendors. More information can be found at www.tumbleweed.com.

Tumbleweed, MailGate, MailGate Appliance, MailGate Email Firewall and MailGate Secure Messenger are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Tumbleweed Communications Corp. in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.