Verizon Business today introduced new tools to help enterprise customers ward off phishing, spyware and virus attacks by exerting more control over how employees use the Internet. As part of the service, Verizon Business is offering a service level agreement that promises 100% platform availability.

Verizon’s new Managed Web Content Services become part of its existing managed security portfolio, which already includes network-based options for firewalls, for warding off denial-of-service attacks and for managing email content. The new trio of offerings, which can be purchased separately, include Web Anti-Virus, Web Anti-Spyware, and Web URL Filtering.

The goal is to enable enterprises to ward off the risks to corporate networks and the loss of productivity and revenue caused by malware, said Cindy Bellefeuille, director of security product management at Verizon Business. The company is backing up its security offering with service level agreements, including the industry’s first SLA for latency, to tie financial penalties into performance, she said.

By partnering with MessageLabs on its network-based offering, Verizon Business intends to provide network-based solutions that enable enterprises to address both known and unknown threats without major upfront capital investment in premises-based security, Bellefeuille said.

While the threat of viruses is not growing, the threats posed by phishing and spyware continue to mount, she said. One of the prime ways to confront these issues is to give enterprises control over how employees use the corporate network to reach the Internet.

“Enterprises can boost productivity based on blocking use of the Internet for non-work purposes,” Bellefeuille said. “We have delivered that capability using a comprehensive Web content management platform. It is a platform through which the administrator can customize on really granular level. They can say that, during football season, I don’t want my users to be able to contact any sports sites.”

The Verizon service uses Skeptic, predictive technology developed by Message Labs that can identify signature-based threats but also “correlates multiple commercial anti-virus and anti-spyware scanners and utilizes heuristics to recognize suspicious characteristics and identify unknown malware,” she said. Heuristics is a technique for assessing the probability that a file contains a computer virus.

The management tools are granular and flexible, Bellefeuille said, enabling enterprises to decide on a per-employee basis how much Internet freedom to provide or to block all downloads by file type, choosing from a list of 50 file types. The anti-Virus and anti-spyware programs do real-time scanning of all Internet traffic, while the anti-phishing program can not only detect and block phishing attempts, based on the content of the email, but also block access to Web sites to prevent employees from accessing a site which is engaged in phishing.

Network administrators have a dashboard with which to establish and monitor policies and also receive email alerts when problems are detected.

The Verizon Business SLAs include availability and latency, as well as 100% blockage of known Web-based malware and activation guarantees of between 30 to 45 days. The price of the service is based on the number of employees and is a per-month operating charge.