By Rebecca Engmann

Liken Internet technology to the Wild West frontier, the classic showdown between sheriff and outlaw involves spammers and virus-spreaders, the menaces of the modern online frontier. And in that seminal showdown between good and evil, Copenhagen's SoftScan is wearing the white hat.

Lost productivity

There's little question that unsolicited e-mails (spam) and destructive computer viruses are the highway robbers of the information superhighway. And a similar sense of helplessness against the e-mail menace prevails among many computer users. The analytical firm IDC recently found that spam mails accounted for 34 percent of all emails sent in 2003, a two-fold increase from 2001, clogging inboxes with dubious offers of everything from prescription drugs to pornography.

Time and money spent each day by international workplaces simply erasing unwanted mails has cost dearly in terms of resources: according to Ostermann Research, the average company of 5,000 workers spends 12,500 man-hours each year sifting through and deleting spam mails, costing 344,000 euros in lost productivity. US companies alone spent 12.5 billion euros in 2002 on spam clean-up efforts. Even so, fewer than five percent of all companies have a task plan in place for spam.

Annoyance factor

Enter SoftScan, which offers internal and external solutions for filtering spam and viruses from company servers. The company has been in business since January 2003, swiftly opening branch offices in London and Stockholm and, according to sales director Thomas Holm, demand has been brisk for SoftScan´s services.

"Spam represents the annoyance factor. People get fed up seeing it pile up after a weekend or holiday, it's time-consuming to erase, and there's a lot of annoying content. Viruses are another story - companies are scared of whatever this malicious code will do. Spam and viruses work together very closely, as hackers can actually use viruses to hijack other PC's and send huge volumes of spam, so today it's a commercial venture," Holm explained.

SoftScan offers two simple, periphery-based filter systems that help to safeguard company servers from spam and viruses. SoftScan Tower is an externally hosted solution, which doesn't require that the client install any special hardware or software. All incoming e-mails are rerouted to SoftScan, which uses a triple-hit of AntiSpam, AntiVirus and WebSafe to scour mails for nuisance code, quarantining or tagging any rogue mails that show up. SoftScan Gate is an equally simple, internally hosted solution. SoftScan installs a black box into the company network, which basically does the Tower's job, in-house.

Death and taxes

Since the company's inception in 2003, SoftScan has relied on positive client testimonials and a proven record of success to become Scandinavia's leading consultant and supplier of protection solutions against spam and viruses, and has made the leap to Stockholm and London even as they continue to expand in Denmark. Øresund IT Magazine asked Thomas Holm if spam and viruses were the "death and taxes" of the Internet frontier - an unstoppable menace that can be controlled, but never completely eliminated.

"It's a big issue - computer viruses have been illegal for 20 years, and yet there's never been more virus activity than today. It's often young people who get involved in writing virus code, so it makes very little impact to slap people with fines. What we can do is to make it more difficult to send spam, make it more expensive, and hit these spammers where it hurts - on the cost side," said Holm.

*Rebecca Engmann is an American journalist living in Copenhagen.