The email security challenge
Email is the most commonly used application on the Internet with an estimated 15 billion email messages sent each day.
Email is now an essential tool for modern business: a truly mission-critical application.
Yet for all its benefits email is:
- The most common method for spreading computer viruses.
- Frequently used to distribute mass mailing and junk advertising, known as spam.
- Used to distribute offensive and pornographic material.
Why you need MailController
- IT spending on these problems is at an all time high
- In 2002 Companies Spent $1.8 billion on anti-virus products and $257 million on email scanning products – IDC
- But, infection rates and costs are increasing…
- 85% of companies reported virus and worm outbreaks – The FBI Computer Crime & Security Survey
- 61% of organisations experienced a virus incident in the last 12 months – KPMG Information Security Survey
- Email represents the biggest single threat
- 85% of all viruses encountered were transmitted across email - The FBI Computer Crime & Security Survey
The window of exposure
- One of the major reasons why viruses continue to be a problem is a concept called ‘the window of exposure’
- This is the time-window between a new virus being released in the wild and when corporate networks are protected.
- Traditional anti-virus vendors typically become aware of a new virus, only when their customers become infected.
- Corporate networks are only protected when new virus signatures have been downloaded and installed.
- Self-updating products such as desktop anti-virus software only check when the systems are rebooted and have an Internet connection available.
- This ‘window of exposure’ is frequently exploited by virus writers who use email to transmit the viruses, infecting many thousands of systems before the the anti-virus products have been updated.
MailController: the solution
- Opal MailController services address these problems by providing a 24x7 fully managed service.
- MailController’s backbone of mail relays scans emails using 2 leading anti-virus technologies and MailController’s own heuristic scanning engine, ‘Huntsman.’
- MailController ensures that viruses and spam are blocked on the Internet, before they reach corporate networks.
Closing the window of exposure
- By leveraging:
- ‘Huntsman’ heuristic scanning
- Leading virus vendors McAffee and Kaspesky
- 24x7 operations.
- The combined protection of three anti-virus technologies.
- MailController is able to close ‘the window of exposure’ more effectively than other solutions.
How MailController works
SMTP relays
MailController’s backbone of SMTP relays are located in data centres across the UK.
Each data centre has multiple Internet connections with highly redundant and load balanced systems.
Email is also load-balanced across multiple data centres to ensure the MailController service is always available.
Anti-virus scanning
MailController leverages the combined protection of the two leading anti-virus vendors McAffee and Kaspesky.
Virus definitions are updated every 10 minutes to ensure customers have the best possible protection.
Huntsman
Huntsman is MailController’s own heuristic scanning engine, which is able to detect new viruses before a virus pattern is available.
Huntsman looks for trends and patterns in messages to spot suspect email.
It also detects known MME-exploits or handcrafted emails which are indicative of a malicious email.
MailController Anti-Spam
MailController Anti-Spam provides comprehensive protection from junk email.
Techniques include:
- White and black lists
- Key word and pattern matching
- Bayesian logic
- DCC – Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse
- Collaborative spam databases
- Spam traps (honey-pots)
- Trend analysis
MailController anti-spam reduces the volume of junk email and improves productivity.
Key benefits
- Increased protection, reduced operational costs.
- Highest detection rates, minimal false positives
- ‘Self-tuning’ adaptive spam filtering technology
- Maintain control via secure management portal
- Per-domain and per-user configuration.
- Minimal helpdesk intervention.
Quarantine
Infected email or junk email is blocked on the MailController relays and is placed in the quarantine area.
The quarantine area is accessed through the on-line portal enabling IT departments to view and release email.
When a message has been quarantined, an automatic notification message can be sent to the sender, recipient or administrator.
Included in the notification message is a link back to the portal, allowing the user to view the content of the email (but not download the infected message) and the reason why it has been quarantined.
Clean email
When email has been scanned by MailController it is then delivered to the customers email system.
The whole process typically takes less than one second per message.
MailController can also add annotations to all inbound and outbound email, enabling companies to add legal disclaimers or promote their business.
Service management
The MailController service can be controlled and managed through the on-line customer portal.
Customers can define company-wide policies for email filtering and view on-line reports.
The MailController dashboard provides a summary view of the email activity across the company.
Summary and key features
- A fully managed service providing comprehensive email security by blocking viruses and malicious email before they reach corporate networks.
- On-line portal with real-time administration.
- 24x7 protection
- Key features:
- Block infected email
- Management dashboard
- Automatic notifications
- HTML annotations
- email firewall
- Mail queueing in the event of customer email server / server connection failure.
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