Managing emerging e-mail threats

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 is under siege. Yesterday, three billion spam messages were sent. Last month, 500 new viruses in the wild. Why the deluge? Pretty darn simple, kind of what motivates all of us but this is what s motivating the attackers and it really is a global problems. It starts with this one guy and he s sending out a template and you can see they ve sent many templates of the e-mails through thousands of hijacked servers. These thousands of hijacked servers go around the world to every location, through all the desktops and what happens is millions of messages are sent out and they result in messages going to hundreds of web servers. These hundreds of web servers, again, are collecting the money.

This whole eco-system is incredibly complex and I d like to say there is a silver bullet answer and I ve got it. Unfortunately, there s not. If you think about some of the tools we use, we ve got authentication. Is the 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 been sending a lot of bad e-mails before or are they a good sender? Very important to understand. And that s not enough, you need to get feedback from the community and you need to understand the content and you need to understand the URL s and where are they pointing, into what kind of sites. Are they trying to steal something, are they trying to sell you something, are they trying to download a malicious key logger? All of this adds up to a complex and dynamic system.

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

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