Secure Skype IM With FaceTime Communications' Greynet Enterprise Manager

BELMONT, CALIFORNIA - FaceTime Communications, the leading provider of solutions that control Internet and unified communications (UC) in the enterprise, today announced enhancements to its Greynet Enterprise Manager (GEM) including detection of malicious URLs entering the enterprise network via Skype instant messaging conversations.

Skype is encrypted using a proprietary method, making it impossible for traditional security products to view the content of a Skype text conversation. Working in partnership with Skype over the last year, FaceTime is the only security vendor with the ability to examine the content of a Skype instant message as it enters the network. Using its leading malware signature database maintained by FaceTime Security Labs, FaceTime's products verify that content is safe and free of malicious URL links before entering the network.

With 276 million registered business users worldwide, Skype's growing popularity and inherent cost savings have made it very attractive to businesses looking to provide the advantages of presence and real-time Internet communications to their employees. Being able to protect against the threat of malware that can enter the network via something as simple as a URL in a chat screen is crucial to IT's realization of the real-time presence benefits of Skype.

An add-on to FaceTime's popular Unified Security Gateway and IMAuditor products, GEM enables organizations to manage security policies and aggregate reporting for IM, P2P and malware traffic across distributed enterprise environments. By integrating with USG, GEM delivers the industry's most robust network-based anti-malware solution, allowing targeted remediation and repair of infected endpoints dynamically based on gateway malware detections from USG.

"Simple block or allow policies are no longer sufficient in most organizations," said Frank Cabri, vice president of marketing and product management for FaceTime. "IT managers are realizing they need to embrace the real-time communications that employees have introduced to the business environment with policies and tools to secure, control, manage, log and archive their use - as well as their content."

Malware entering enterprise networks via real-time communications such as instant messaging and Skype costs businesses nearly $289,000 annually on average, according to the 2007 survey "Greynets in the Enterprise: Third Annual Survey of Trends, Attitudes and Impact," conducted by NewDiligence Research and commissioned by FaceTime. The survey revealed that IT managers experience nearly 39 incidents per month, on average, that require some kind of repair or remediation to end user PCs, and each repair requires, on average, about nine hours of work.

tag: VoIP Security, skype Vulnerability, FaceTime Communications, Greynet Enterprise Manager, unified communications, malware signature, IMAuditor,