Email Spam Filters

Email is now your most critical business application. It warrants robust protection.

However, current approaches to email security be they LAN or Managed Service Provider based, are failing to eliminate vulnerabilities. Customers now face increased complexity, decreased control and visibility, variable effectiveness, noticeable message delivery delays and inadequate protection from new threats.

Our email management solutions ARMed SMTP is a unique next generation approach to email security. Our email management solution resolves the numerous problems inherent in current email security and combats the various new forms of email security threats that your network will probably be subjected to.

The anatomy of an email attack:

Email is a popular tool for criminals on the Internet. It is attractive to criminals because of the wide population of systems and users available to interact with on an almost entirely anonymous basis. Whether the attack is simply spam based or a complicated and directed blended-threat the intention is frequently financially motivated and the target is often random.

There are four general types of attack:

1. A directed criminal attack aimed at stealing information or compromising the systems of a specific company or network, often deployed using specifically crafted tools.
2. A recruitment attack aimed at extending the attackers own network of "zombies" or machines under their control which are subsequently used for hire or to deliver spam, propagate viruses and/or mount distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks.
3. A sabotage attack aims to wreak havoc on an organization or the Internet ingeneral. These are often ego motivated where the attacker or author of the virus seeks either vengeance on the victim, greater notoriety or financial gain, usually through blackmail.
4. A spam/scam attack aims to pump unsolicited commercial or fraudulent bulk email onto your network in the hope of either winning the custom of your staff, having them participate in a program that benefits the scammer (e.g.: buying a particular stock), or have them provide valuable information to the attacker. (e.g. Phishing)

The anatomy of an email based attack, whether directed or spam based, will be determined by the intentions of the attacker. Within the SMTP protocol and the construction of an SMTP email message, there are several opportunities to exploit weaknesses both known and unknown. This allows the attacker malicious access to your resources.

Stop spam before it reaches your network

Our email management solutions security success means:

• 99% of spam eliminated before it reaches Microsoft Exchange
• Protects legitimate email (zero content-based false positives)
• Prioritization of legitimate email
• 100% virus protection record

Competitors vs. Our Email Management Solution

Key Requirements	Competitors	Our Email Management Solution
Performance	Performance degradation during peaks and outbreaks	Consistent performance
Block Spam & Viruses	Inaccurate and highly administrative	99% spam blocked 100% virus protection record
Protect Legitimate Email	Legitimate email quarantined. Disruptive to users	Zero content-based positives
Defense In Depth	Dated techniques applied, generally heavily focused on content scoring	Multi-layered security practices with deep scanning and interrogation of all data

Phising

How our email management solution protects against emails containing Phishing attacks, Spam and Viruses:
Our email management solution's anti-spam service utilises a custom-built MTA, which is designed to take advantage of our email management solution's distributed process capabilities to be security and policy aware. The first step passes through denial of service protection and then it uses local & global reputation at a connection level to decide to accept or reject the message. The message then moves onto RFC conformity checking which queries the sending mail server to ensure it is not a spam bot. If it passes this check, our email management solution can perform further optional checking based on the content of the message. If email is coming from a known good party our email management solution will prioritise them (add to a white list).

Next the message is run through multiple commercial & our email management solution's proprietary AV engines and passes through layer 7 intrusion prevention which looks for OS & application exploits; it then is scans for URL links to known bad web servers – if unknown it will proactively check the website to see if it contains known malware. Our email management solution will check email for known phishing content and graphics (this also captures any image spam).

Our email management solution does not accept the message until it passes all these checks, and will then pass the message onto our email management solution's policy engine (disclaimers, attachments, content filtration). This offers very efficient connection-based spam management, augmented with effective content-based analysis and policy enforcement. The results are 99% of spam blocked at connection.