Spam + Outsourcing = Peace of Mind ...

Computerworld - ... for e-mail users, according to Ashok Kalle, president of Pathway Communications in Toronto. He claims that better than 99% of spam can be filtered by a combination of his company's NetPulse appliance, which becomes generally available on Aug. 15, and an optional $1-per-month-per-mailbox service that employs workers in India who review every single piece of spam sequestered from a mail queue by the spam filter. "It's fairly easy for a trained individual to figure out what spam is," he says. "We want to offer another filter layer not to catch spam, which the appliance does, but to catch false positives." For anyone who has missed an important message due to a strict spam filter, this could be a big plus. NetPulse is based on the open-source Spam Assassin software combined with Pathway's proprietary filtering technology and, of course, those luckless folks in India.

• Pathway Communications is also a vendor of the oft-maligned intrusion-detection system (IDS). IDSs are widely known to send so many alerts that network admins end up ignoring them, which can lead to trouble, since some alerts should be acted upon. That's why Guidance Software Inc. in Pasadena, Calif., has come up with a product called EnCase Enterprise, which can receive an alert and, according to CEO John Patzakis, "quickly look at the binaries that caused the alert to see if the system has been hacked." EnCase looks at every sector on a hard drive's platters and can identify crackers' tools, renamed files and other telltale signs that something is amiss with the drive. Next week the company will unveil new features in the 4.15 upgrade. The most significant is that IT security staffs can now scan drives across local- or wide-area networks. Previously, the security software had to run locally on the suspect system. EnCase lets users determine exactly how a file got onto a drive, which can be helpful in situations where litigation is involved. Erased files can be recovered and "hidden partitions" found, claims Patzakis. That puts a damper on corporate espionage and even rogue businesses that are using company technology, such as one unnamed customer's IT workers who were caught by EnCase augmenting their salaries by running a porn site from the data center. Pricing starts at $2,500.

• Ken Boyd, CIO of the Remedy division of Houston-based BMC Software Inc., has some advice for IT executives in the midst of an acquisition: Don't let one IT group force its ways on the newly merged organization. He should know. In less than two years, he went through a botched acquisition by San Diego-based Peregrine Systems Inc. and what he calls a successful one by BMC. In fact, he goes so far as to say that Peregrine's strategy to force an inferior, albeit corporate, standard technology on Remedy was "a contributing factor" to the resale of Remedy to BMC. What BMC has done right, he says, is to pick the best technologies from both operations. Also, he says BMC has been "more focused on business policies and not a desire to control," which was not the case with Peregrine.