ServGate Technologies, the provider of integrated, modular network security platforms, today announced that the Ministry of Education in China has selected ServGate to deploy multiple EdgeForce platforms throughout its network topology in a nationwide antispam campaign to eliminate the prevalence of spam and viruses frequently propagated by spam.

With the growing pervasiveness of spam as a carrier of blended attacks, the Ministry of Education's network is on the verge of becoming the most spam-infected governmental sector in the PRC. To effectively contain the spreading of spam, the Ministry of Education initiated an emergency antispam campaign to require by the end of June 2004 that 80 percent of all e-mail addresses have an antispam mechanism in place. The notice also required that email service providers adopt more stringent antispam technologies when building out their email infrastructures.

ServGate is the developer of EdgeForce, the integrated security platform offering McAfee-based spam and virus screening applications in addition to web filtering by SurfControl, attack protection, web caching, firewall and VPN services. EdgeForce platforms also perform Full Context Inspection, which provides unified threat protection by screening real time packet contents in their complete, proper context to block suspicious traffic at the network perimeter. The EdgeForce platform's modular architecture accommodates new services and performance upgrades on all EdgeForce systems, enabling them to scale with the growth of the customer's business and network needs, and adapt to the changing threat environment.

According to the latest research from SBL Database, a respected spam comparison source, China was the most spam-infected nation among the 10 countries surveyed. Forty-seven percent of viruses in China are propagated by spam, according to the Internet Society of China, which said that in 2003, China's Internet servers had received altogether 150 billion spam emails, accounting for 30 percent of the country's total.