Janet stymies spam with Sophos

Janet, the organisation that operates the UK's education and research computer network, is to use a Sophos ES4000 e-mail appliance to try to stem the tide of spam, phishing and data leakage currently battering against its gateway.

Sophos revealed the extent of Janet's problems yesterday. The Joint Academic NETwork is deluged by 100,000 spams a month, in addition to malware attacks. And these are just the attacks that Sophos has identified.

Janet bought two Sophos ES4000 appliances as its staff deal with large volumes of external e-mail, and routinely send out confidential information and business-critical communications.

Peter Kent, head of ICT services at Janet, said that the solution improved security and speed of delivery. "Our ICT administrators are thrilled with the drastic reduction in unwanted e-mail, which formerly flooded our employees' inboxes," he said.

"On one user's account, the appliance has blocked more than 150,000 spam messages to date, many of which would have slipped through our previous vendor's filter and caused serious productivity problems.

"Now employees don't have to read and delete unwanted mail while our ICT administrators enjoy low-level maintenance."

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