Small Business Advice Newsletter

Email Security

The need to monitor email messages for dangerous, offensive or confidential content has never been more evident.

With fraudulent, inappropriate and offensive emails being delivered in vast quantities to businesses every day, email content filtering and spam protection should also be a vital component of your network’s security strategy.

The most deadly viruses, (able to cripple your email system and corporate network in minutes), are being distributed worldwide via email in a matter of hours. Products that perform single vendor anti-virus scanning do not provide sufficient protection. Worse still, email is likely to become the means for installing backdoors (Trojans) and other harmful programs to help potential intruders break into your network.

Products restricted to a single anti-virus engine will not protect against email exploits and attacks of this kind. Your best defence is to install a comprehensive email content checking and anti-virus solution to safeguard your mail server and network.

Note that firewalls offer no protection against email threats, while standard anti-virus software only protects against a small percentage of the possible threats borne by emails.

Using server-based software protection on your mail server or at the Gateway, eliminates the deployment and administration hassle of desktop-based anti-virus, anti-spam and anti-phishing products. Desktop-based software involves training your users to create anti-spam rule sets, and subsequently users have to spend time updating these rules. Server-based filtering significantly reduces overheads, data storage and has the flexibility to incorporate numerous features that would not be available with desktop products.

We recommend some server-based security products that fulfil this need in our Product Recommendations section below.
 

Business Continuity & Productivity
   - the email threat

Consider just a few of the dangers to business continuity and productivity that can arise from inadequately protected email systems:

• Viruses and Worms are malignant entities that can take over your computer, send your private information to attackers, destroy your hard drive, bring your computer to a stand still, spread to other PCs on your network and disrupt productivity in general. If one of your PCs starts sending out spam or viruses to recipients outside of your organisation, then your domain will most likely be "black listed", so that none of your valid emails are accepted by external recipients, especially those that are running email protection systems.
• Trojans in the IT world are used to enter a victim's computer undetected, granting the attacker unrestricted access to the data stored on that computer and causing great damage to the victim. A trojan can be a hidden program that runs on your computer without your knowledge, or it can be 'wrapped' into a legitimate program meaning that this program may therefore have hidden functions that you are not aware of.
• Phishing attacks trick people into revealing sensitive or private information. The crooks rely on the fact that asking a large number of people for this information, will always fool at least a small number of people. In a phishing attempt, the attacker would typically create a situation where people believe that they are dealing with an authorised party, such as their bank. Emails can be very sophisticated and credible, leading people to realistic facsimiles of a bank or other website. The attacker then either asks the victim for sensitive information such as credit card details or simply prompts them to log in, thus gaining their online password.
• Spam wastes network users’ time and network resources, and can also be dangerous - causing users to click on links to malicious websites.
• Email Bombs and other attacks occur when you receive an immense number of email messages in a very short time. Directory harvesting attacks are generated by spammers trying to discover valid email addresses at your organisation by sending email to thousands of different addresses. Floods like these can bring your email service to its knees, fill up all your email storage space, and result in the loss of legitimate messages.

There is a long list of potential threats and we have just touched on a few, but we have outlined potential solutions for small businesses running networks with mail servers that cover all such threats in the section below.

If you would like help or advice on this subject, then please contact us
 

Product Recommendations

We like to recommend products that we have personal experience with.

This month we would like to recommend the following solutions for small businesses. We use GFi products on our office network. These products include automatic updates and product enhancements to cope with the ever evolving threat landscape.

We feature some of these products in our online catalogue, but for some items you may be referred to our partner sites to make an actual purchase.
 

Regulatory & Other Updates

Each month we will feature some of the recent regulatory updates or other important news affecting small businesses:

Contact us if you would like any further information about the items in this newsletter.

Please let us have any feedback you might have, and also let us know if there are any articles you would like to see covered in future issues by sending an email to sales@wise.co.uk.

Best regards,

Tim Weaver

Weaver Information Services (Europe) Limited trading as WISE.CO.UK,
Telephone +44 (0) 1438 453013. Email info@wise.co.uk
Registered office 11 Watton Road, Knebworth SG3 6AH.
Registered in England no. 2618391. VAT registration GB 573 1139 51.