London, UK - Monday, March 6th, 2006 - The Open
University has selected FaceTime Communications, the leading
provider of solutions for securing IM, P2P and spyware Greynets, to
prevent worms and viruses from using instant messaging (IM) to
invade and exploit its UK student network. The Open University is
the world's first successful distance learning university with more
than 180,000 students that interact online from home around the
world. FaceTime's IMAuditor was chosen to fully integrate with the
Open University's existing diverse infrastructure and to meet all
the management requirements desired by the Open University staff,
including flexible reporting, management and scalability. The
solution provides the Open University with the ability to tailor
the settings to respect users' privacy which is very important to
the Open University educational community. IMAuditor also offers
low maintenance and ease of integration with existing
infrastructure, which helps keep the costs down. FaceTime's
IMAuditor will be used to provide protection from viruses, worms
and IM Spam (SPIM). A log of the date and time of public IM
conversations will help the University to investigate, should
allegations of abuse or harassment arise involving IM, and
significantly mitigate against the potential for loss of reputation
or legal liability. Chris Wigglesworth, senior systems programmer,
network development team, the Open University comments:
"While the Open University does not yet use IM in its core
business or actively promote its use, we recognised that staff were
increasingly using IM effectively in their daily interactions.
Realising that the nature of instant messaging means worms can
propagate extremely quickly and that a firewall cannot be relied
upon to protect against threats spreading via IM, having a product
such as IMAuditor in place gives us considerable peace of mind."
The Open University will also benefit from FaceTime's Day Zero
Defense System. An integral component of IMAuditor, the Day Zero
Defense System utilises attributes such as message frequency,
content matching, URL identification and other heuristics to detect
malicious behaviour and stop infections in real-time - rather than
the conventional approach which requires organisations to wait
hours or even days for a signature to be created, tested and
distributed. The system employs a patent pending challenge/response
mechanism that allows administrators to quarantine suspicious IM
conversations and initiate a challenge to the sender which requires
a human to successfully respond to the challenge. This stops
malicious threats created by computer bots and allows uninterrupted
delivery of legitimate communications sent by human sources.
Wigglesworth continues:
"FaceTime's IMAuditor does what we need an IM security solution to
do. It scans file transfers for viruses using our existing
anti-virus, it can be deployed on Linux and it logs the IP
addresses of clients. The unique challenge-response mechanism
prevents IM worms and SPIM without relying solely on signatures."
Nick Sears, managing director for Europe, the Middle East and
Africa, FaceTime Communications, comments:
"It's encouraging to see an organisation such as the Open
University tackling the IM risk head-on whilst fully embracing the
benefits it can provide. More awareness is needed of what
constitutes 'best practice' when it comes to IM use within an
organisation and the OU is setting a good example. It's great to be
able to help the Open University deploy a solution that enables
them to realise their strategy of safe and secure use of all
instant messaging throughout their organisation."
About Actiance, Inc. (Formerly FaceTime Communications, Inc.)
FaceTime Communications became Actiance, Inc on January 11, 2011 following an agreement to
transfer the FaceTime trademark to Apple.
FaceTime Communications enables the safe and productive use of Unified Communications and Web 2.0,
including instant messaging, blogs and social networking. Ranked number one by IDC for five consecutive
years, FaceTime's award-winning solutions are used by more than 1,500 customers for the security,
management and compliance of real-time communications. FaceTime supports or has strategic partnerships
with all leading IM, unified communications providers and social networks including AOL, Google, Yahoo!,
Skype, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
FaceTime is headquartered in Belmont, California. For more information visit
http://www.facetime.com or call 888-349-3223.
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