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MIRAPOINT CUSTOMERS UNAFFECTED BY SoBig VIRUS
Mirapoint Outlines Top Precautionary Measures Businesses Can Take to Avoid Viruses

SUNNYVALE, Calif., September 30, 2003 - Mirapoint today announced that none of its 600 customers, which include Fortune 500 enterprises, universities, government, and service providers, reported being affected by the recent SoBig virus, which contaminated hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide and caused an estimated $50 million of damage in the United States alone. The Mirapoint Message Director, which provides boundary control over message traffic to defend against spam, virus, and hacker attacks, was able to prevent both incoming and outgoing emails from being affected by the SoBig virus.

"We deployed the Mirapoint Message Director earlier this year to serve our 3,000 employees for email routing, anti-virus, and anti-spam protection," said Steve Higgins, systems engineer at Centra Health. "As a non-profit health organization, we cannot afford the costs and downtime associated with viruses, such as SoBig. While many businesses were affected by the virus, with the deployment of the Mirapoint Message Director, Centra was able to continue to securely and reliably communicate with our employees, as well as serve our patients."

"The SoBig virus hit as our students were returning to campus for the fall semester, and many were unaware of the virus and its magnitude," said Tony Falzon, director of research and Internet services at Wayne State University. "Between alumni, faculty, staff and students, Wayne State serves over 50,000 active email accounts. Due to the massive amount of mail that goes through our network, we noticed some degradation in performance when the SoBig virus hit, but WSU email users who use Mirapoint exclusively were not infected, but simply received messages that were cleaned of the virus."

Top Five Preventative Measures to Avoid Computer Viruses
In the event of the next inevitable virus outbreak, businesses can avoid costly outage and lost productivity by implementing a few key precautionary measures:

1. Deploy virus scanning on network edge at the email gateway - If a company uses desktop-based anti-virus products, they're leaving the responsibility to end users to regularly update virus protection software. Unfortunately, these users may forget to install security patches and updates in a timely fashion or may even inappropriately configure their desktop virus protection at the outset.
2. Update virus scanning 'pattern files' regularly - Make sure the anti-virus solution provides ongoing updates and the vendor has a strong track record for regular and rapid, updates in response to new and emerging virus threats. Many products even include tools for automatically updating the virus-scanning engine as soon as new 'updates' are available.
3. Protect outgoing email traffic - An added benefit of deploying virus scanning at the network edge is the ability to not only monitor incoming messages, but also outgoing emails. In the unfortunate event that a company gets a virus infection, it does not want to be held responsible for further spreading a virus across the Internet to business partners, vendors, suppliers or even customers.
4. Manage junk mail to help defend against viruses - Increasingly virus threats are spread just like spam messages, with attachments or links associated with a junk mail message. Experts have speculated that spammers are behind the SoBig virus, which turned infected computers into spam-relay machines. For this reason, a combination of powerful incoming and outgoing virus- and spam-filtering technology can help better address 99 percent of the threats a company might face.
5. Take advantage of the network's reporting and logging tools - Most email gateway products provide some means of reporting on email traffic and messages moving in and out of a company's network. If the current solution doesn't provide this feature, look at upgrading to a product that provides this granular view of message traffic. This reporting and logging information can be invaluable for providing early clues to an internal virus outbreak (abnormally high outgoing email traffic from individual users is a good indicator), as well as general information on network usage that can be used for identifying a spammer or other email abuse.

To provide Mirapoint customers with unparalleled security, Mirapoint and Sophos, a provider of corporate anti-virus protection, have partnered to offer customers increased protection against harmful, email-borne viruses through Sophos' anti-virus technology.

"The partnership between Sophos and Mirapoint provides customers with a complete end-to-end solution for securing message networks," said Ralph Pisani, Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Sophos, Inc. "There are many products on the market that address the individual concerns related to Internet messaging, but there are very few comprehensive solutions like the Mirapoint products that handle all aspects of email, including anti-virus, anti-spam, routing, storage, access and management. By combining the Mirapoint Message Director at the email gateway and Sophos Anti-Virus at the desktop, customers are provided complete end-to-end 'all points' protection."

In addition to viruses, there are a few additional security concerns businesses should implement, such as business continuity planning; enforcing policies on your network to manage corporate liability; addressing compliance and industry-specific regulations; archival of email; as well as employing a 'hardened' operating system - with no known exploits - that cannot be abused by hackers.

About Mirapoint
Mirapoint® is a leader in solutions for message networks used by service provider, enterprise, education and government institutions. Customers use Mirapoint solutions to build message networks that intelligently route, store, access and manage Internet messages, including email. Mirapoint is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., with offices throughout North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. The company has more than 600 customers worldwide. For more information on Mirapoint, visit its Web site at http://www.mirapoint.com/.

2007 Mirapoint, Inc.  All rights reserved. All company and product names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

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