Trend Micro's U.S. subsidiary has acquired Kelkea, a supplier of IP filtering and reputation services.
Executives at the Tokyo-based Trend, an antivirus and content security provider, said the acquisition would help it develop products to protect networks against phishing, pharming, and threats that can be launched via botnets.
"This acquisition will significantly enhance Trend Micro's ability to develop innovative solutions against threats that we know are evolving but are extremely concerning to us," Eva Chen Trend Micro CEO, said in a statement.
Kelkea was formed last year, when it bought the assets of Mail Abuse Prevention Systems (MAPS), a nonprofit anti-spam organiztaion. Kelkea provides anti-spam services for ISPs such as AOL and RoadRunner using its IP filtering technology to block incoming communications of known, offensive IP addresses.
The company maintains a network for monitoring and rating the reputation of IP addresses, otherwise known as reputation services. According to Trend Micro, reputation services can be used to block not only spam but phishing and botnet attacks.
The acquisiton of Kelkea marks a mini shopping spree by Trend Micro, which last month agreed to acquire anti-spyware supplier InterMute, as SC reported.
Dave Rand, Kelkea CEO, chairman, and founder, will serve as chief technologist of internet content security at Trend Micro.
While phishing tries to dupe end users into divulging sensitive data via email, pharming is a newer type of attack that compromises a victim's system or a DNS server to redirect traffic to a malicious site. Botnets - networks of compromised systems - can be used by attackers to launch spam or denial-of-service attacks.
