The enhancements, which will be incorporated early next year, are designed to provide enterprises with protection from worms and viruses, without forcing customers to install firewalls at each location in a network, the company said.
The worm and virus mitigation tools will be added to AT&T?s network-based firewall. The tools are designed to find and stop worms and viruses before they infect systems within AT&T?s global IP network, the company said.
Earlier this year, AT&T announced tools for tackling denial-of-service and distributed denial-of-service attacks. In such attacks, networks are deluged with millions of requests for service, which can cripple servers and routers, resulting in downtime.
"By using the network as a key security component, our customers can reduce the complexity of the overall security system," Kathleen Flaherty, AT&T's chief marketing officer, said in a statement. "And reduced complexity can help make their operations much more secure."