Email Security
Over the past few years we have witnessed a sharp decline in traditional virus outbreaks, yet with more than 450,000 new instances of malware being discovered each year, companies such as Sophos, McAfee and Trend Micro say that they are unable to keep up with the rate at which new malicious code is being identified.
The reason for this is that email is no longer the principle means of getting malicious code into your company network. Instead, malicious code is now being hosted on web servers to which users are directed either through a compromised web site which diverts them to the malicious web server, or by means of links in emails that are spammed to millions of recipients intended to fool the user that they are clicking through to something of interest to them.
In addition, the sheer volume of spam now creates its own problems. Spammers are clever, and make their emails very convincing. Even working out what you should or shouldn’t click on wastes time and the whole process of spam management can be extremely annoying. Furthermore, many companies use email archiving to store and manage all emails that they receive, and it is undesirable and inefficient to clog up email archives with spam emails.
The Solution
Leading email security products such as
Ironport and
McAfee
employ a combination of approaches to secure your company email and apply
your email acceptable usage policy. Reputation filtering is a technique used
by Ironport and Secure Computing to reduce the amount of spam mail entering
your network. It uses intelligence gained from monitoring emails received by
honeypot email addresses together with bought-in information from ISP’s,
third party black listing organisations, together with other factors to
determine whether the email entering your network is from a reputable
sender. As an example, if the email that is being processed claims to be
from a UK clearing bank, but was sent from Russia, includes a link to a web
site in China, and the sending server was only seen 2 days ago, yet it has
just sent out 5 million messages, the message is definitely spam and will be
dropped. In our own network, we are seeing that reputation filtering alone
drops up to 95% of all incoming email, with very few false positives.
A Blended Approach
By combining traditional pattern based antivirus, email filtering, Bayesian
spam filtering and reputation filtering,
Ironport and
McAfee
provide robust email
security products that will protect small and large organisations from
viruses, spam and malicious code. Given the move towards use of the web to
deliver malicious code into the organisation however, a robust content
security solution should also include
web security to
scan for malware in web downloads.
Clearview Systems are accredited partners for Ironport and McAfee. Our engineers will be able to advise you which product is best suited to your needs, and can also help with product assessment, trials and deployment to your user base.