Israeli security company PineApp held its first international customer and partner conference this week announcing the launch of a new product to exterminate zombies.

Zombies are computers infected by malicious code controlled by hackers remotely, often to send unwanted email or to launch denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

Gabriel Mizrahi, PineApp co-founder and chief technology officer, introduced ZombiCop as a “stand-alone zombie exterminator” that will provide a layer of protection against zombie-based threats and improve the detection rates of spam, phishing and viruses in any environment.

Sean Johnson of PineApp reseller Hayes Computer Systems said this puts PineApp at the forefront of network security. “The majority of companies do not have a zombie detection system in place,” he explained.

PineApp also announced updates to its flagship email security product, Mail-SeCure, and to its recently announced Surf-SeCure web filtering appliance.

Mail-SeCure is a complete email perimeter security solution that blocks threats, such as viruses, worms and Trojan horses, prior to a user receiving message content, PineApp said. The vendor is now adding to the product with a new mail encryption solution that will be fully hosted by internet service providers and allow users to encrypt emails by just pressing a button.

“We are adding encryption ability to PineApp allowing users to send an encrypted email without having to send it first to the chief security officer,” said Mizrahi.

The update will also allow users to create settings to define specific content they want to be encrypted.

Hayes’ Johnson said the need for encrypted emails is relatively low at the moment but expects it to rise in the near future with tighter security controls and regulation.

“It is now mainly banks that have email encryption capabilities because they are so expensive but we are launching an affordable solution to the market that we expect will be a big hit with enterprise-size organisations to SMEs,” said Mizrahi.

Surf-SeCure is a real-time filtering system that protects an organisation from internet- based threats by inspecting HTTP and FTP traffic and providing protection against worms and viruses. The appliance can be set according to an organisation’s surfing policy. New abilities were announced that will allow organisations to monitor their staff’s internet usage via the Surf-SeCure appliance.

PineApp also announced the development of a solution to detect and block unwanted file transfers via voice over IP technology.

“We searched for a niche that no one is covering well and Skype is a major problem in security because its encryption has never been solved,” Mizrahi said. “It’s a wild animal.”

Further details of the network-based solution will be available when it is launched with the next release of Surf-SeCure 2.5.