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SEATTLE – January 24, 2011. WatchGuard® Technologies, a global leader of business security solutions, today released an update to its award-winning XCS (extensible content security) line of email and web content security appliances. This latest software upgrade is available for free and includes new features that make stopping spam even easier, as well as new email encryption capabilities.

"E-mail continues to be a significant threat vector for businesses around the world," said Tim Helming, Director of Product Management at WatchGuard Technologies. "These latest enhancements to WatchGuard's XCS security appliances provide for even better spam blocking efficacy and the new encryption features give peace of mind to businesses that want to ensure that their sensitive data is handled securely."

WatchGuard XCS Outlook Add-in – Putting Control in User's Hands

With this latest update, business users can utilize a new WatchGuard XCS add-in for Outlook. This new feature allows end users to easily mark any delivered messages that bypass the XCS spam filters as either "spam" or "not spam." This way, the end user gains the ability to report false positives, where legitimate messages were marked as spam, as well as false negatives, where a good message was tagged mistakenly as spam. In addition, the tool adds senders to the end user's personal "trusted" or "blocked" senders list. These features improve overall XCS efficacy while giving users more control over their messages.

WatchGuard XCS SecureMail Email Encryption

Addressing the growing concern of how businesses manage sensitive email, WatchGuard strengthens its XCS line with SecureMail Email Encryption. This allows end users to encrypt outbound messages directly from the WatchGuard XCS appliance without the need for a local encryption server or additional desktop software. Messages are secure until they are delivered and unencrypted via a simple authentication process by the message recipient.

This feature can also be customized as a branded service for organizations that wish to promote their brand as part of their commitment to highly secure email communications.

WatchGuard Extensible Content Security (XCS) - Comprehensive Protection

The WatchGuard XCS platform provides "defense-in-depth" protection by combining advanced email inspection technologies with data loss prevention capabilities and IP reputation to combat spam, viruses, malware and other forms of blended threats. Designed to address a wide range of business needs, the WatchGuard XCS platform tackles email security needs of small to medium sized businesses (up to 1,000 users) with the WatchGuard XCS 170, 370 and 570 series, and for mid-tier and enterprise organizations (10,000 or more users) that require advanced messaging and content protection, WatchGuard offers the WatchGuard XCS 770, 970 and 1170 series of appliances.

All of these appliances share best in class quality detection for maximum coverage and accuracy, as well as rapid response capabilities for zero-day threat outbreaks, and automatic updates to protect against new forms of crimeware, spyware, rootkits, mobile malware and other malicious attacks.

Additionally, all of the WatchGuard XCS appliances can take advantage of WatchGuard's revolutionary in-the-cloud security technology, Reputation Enabled Defense. Reputation Enabled Defense eliminates up to 98.3 percent of spam e-mail before it ever gets to a business network. Given that spam messages are a major carrier of viruses, phishing attempts and blended threats, having Reputation Enabled Defense pre-screen and eliminate this unwanted traffic makes business networks, applications and data better protected as part of WatchGuard's defense-in-depth architecture.