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Video Whiteboard: Managing emerging e-mail threats

January 6, 2009, 1:00 AM PST

November 18, 2005, 10:43 PM PST | Length:00:03:51

With viruses rife and three billion spam messages flowing around the world each day, some of them Zombies sent from your own desktop, Anne Bonaparte of MailFrontier says that mail servers need to be protected with a solution that is comprehensive, affordable and easy.

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About Bill Detwiler

Bill Detwiler is Head Technology Editor of TechRepublic. Previously, he worked as a Support Tech and IT Manager in the social research and energy industries.

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Transcript

Hello, I m Anne Bonapart, president and CEO of MailFrontier.I wanted to talk to you today about managing emerging e-mail threats. E-mail isunder siege. Yesterday, three billion spam messages were sent. Last month, 500new viruses in the wild. Why the deluge? Pretty darn simple, kind of whatmotivates all of us but this is what s motivating the attackers and it reallyis a global problems. It starts with this one guy and he s sending out atemplate and you can see they ve sent many templates of the e-mails throughthousands of hijacked servers. These thousands of hijacked servers go aroundthe world to every location, through all the desktops and what happens ismillions of messages are sent out and they result in messages going to hundredsof web servers. These hundreds of web servers, again, are collecting the money.

This whole eco-system is incredibly complex and I d like tosay there is a silver bullet answer and I ve got it. Unfortunately, there snot. If you think about some of the tools we use, we ve got authentication. Isthe sender really the sender? And even if you knew that, are you safe?Unfortunately not. Then you ve got the reputation of the sender. Have they beensending a lot of bad e-mails before or are they a good sender? Very importantto understand. And that s not enough, you need to get feedback from thecommunity and you need to understand the content and you need to understand theURL s and where are they pointing, into what kind of sites. Are they trying tosteal something, are they trying to sell you something, are they trying todownload a malicious key logger? All of this adds up to a complex and dynamicsystem.

So what impact does all of this have on that mail server,that mail server that s supporting your organization? Well, unfortunately, thatmail service is undoing a lot of hard work. You ve got the spam, those threebillion messages a day. You ve got the viruses, both the identified withsignature and all those out in the wild. You ve got dictionary attacks anddirectory harvest attacks where they re trying to steal your corporateinformation to spam you more and you ve got denial of service attacks trying totake down your system.

That s not all. That s all in the inbound path. On theoutbound path, you have new attacks which I hope none of you have experiencedbut those are zombies and that of course, is when one of the spammers takesover the desktops of your organization and you suddenly start spewing spam. Sothis mail server is getting pounded, getting pounded from both directions. Theanswer really for how you can protect your organization is really to put a fullprotection wall around the whole mail server with a comprehensive e-mailsecurity solution that takes care of all threats named and unnamed 24/7 inboundand outbound. The elements of this e-mail server that are most important asyou re looking for security solutions is one, of course, comprehensive.Clearly, the threats are evolving every day and you need a system that s goingto take care of you. Two, affordable, that probably goes without saying andthree, easy, so that the system itself can be managing your e-mail securitywhile you get back to revenue generating projects.

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