BOSTON -- IT security and control firm Sophos today announced the addition of Sophos eXtensible Lists (SXL) to its Email Security and Control solutions portfolio. SXL is an online look-up system that dramatically accelerates the distribution of anti-spam intelligence, moving away from traditional scheduled updates to a real-time system that provides quicker response to new and emerging spam campaigns. Sophos customers will receive this industry leading, rapid detection and deployment capability automatically.

Rather than requiring the anti-spam engine to rely solely on local data when checking messages for spam, SXL enables real-time access to a wider range of information. It contains current and historical anti-spam intelligence such as IP addresses, URIs, message checksums, image/document fingerprints, etc. If the local anti-spam engine cannot conclusively determine if a message is spam, it can now reference the SXL database (using the DNS protocol) to check for any additional information that might be available from SophosLabs, but not yet downloaded.

A hosted database service, SXL works in conjunction with Sophos’s email gateway solutions – Sophos Email Appliances and PureMessage for Exchange and UNIX – to provide the most effective security and control available today.

Sophos plc