For many businesses, e-mail has become the communication of choice. Unfortunately, e-mail has also become the communication of choice for schemers, hackers, advertisers, virus writers and so many others, which saps the efficiency of email for legitimate use.
Symantec Corp. recently announced it is raising the bar for enterprise e-mail security protection by delivering the industry’s first integrated best-of-breed anti-spam, antivirus and content filtering protection in a single software solution for SMTP gateways — Symantec Mail Security for SMTP 5.0.
Solution providers have turned to security vendors for the tools to combat productivity draining unsolicited e-mail. Many of those tools only address part of the problem, which has forced solution providers to integrate a mishmash of products to offer the proper levels of protection.
The combination of technologies proactively protects against inbound and outbound e-mail threats at the earliest point of network entry — the Internet e-mail (SMTP) gateway. Scheduled to be available in May, Symantec Mail Security for SMTP 5.0 is the final integration of Brightmail and Symantec technologies into a single, unified solution, and is a key component of Symantec Enterprise Messaging Management solution portfolio.
"Today’s enterprises rely heavily on e-mail for both internal and external business communication," said Brian Burke, Research Manager at IDC’s Security Products. "To protect against malicious code, phishing attacks, viruses, spam and other unwanted e-mail, organizations require a comprehensive solution that provides layers of protection to stop inbound and outbound e-mail threats from impacting organizations and compromising security."
Symantec hopes to reinvent the e-mail security market with the release of Symantec Mail Security for SMTP 5.0. What is more, the product’s intelligent handling of e-mail protects against e-mail borne threats such as phishing schemes and the passing of confidential information.
E-mail has become a primary communications tool for companies and government agencies around the world, and with its growth comes the increased risk of threats. According to IDC, 80 percent of viruses enter through the e-mail gateway.
In addition, the most recent Symantec Internet Security Threat Report (March 7, 2006) cites that phishing attempts made up one in every 119 e-mail messages processed, which constituted an average of 7.92 million phishing attempts detected per day in the second half of 2005 — a 39 percent increase over the first half of 2005. The report also states that Symantec’s antifraud filters — a key technology included in Symantec Mail Security for SMTP 5.0 — blocked more than 1.5 billion phishing attempts during this period.
While on the surface Symantec’s product does not seem to break any new ground, that assessment could not be any farther from the truth. What Symantec has accomplished with Mail Security for SMTP 5.0 is a synergy between what were once very different technologies. Instead of an administrator having to worry about multiple e-mail threats in various forms, threat management is now under the realm of a single, comprehensive security system. It becomes a simple method of dictating whether an e-mail is safe or unsafe, all in a single process.
Customers are also looking for consolidation of technologies into a single solution for e-mail gateways. "Today’s enterprises prefer the convenience of a strong, integrated e-mail security solution from a single trusted vendor," said Rick Caccia, senior director of product management for Symantec Messaging and Web Security. "Symantec Mail Security for SMTP offers the industry’s best technologies in threat protection, anti-spam, and content filtering to significantly reduce the risk of threats to the network posed by email-based threats, and to control the flow of unauthorized or inappropriate content in e-mail both internally and externally."
"As a private education institute, we must prevent e-mail threats from compromising the security of our student and staff information, while ensuring that the school is able to operate efficiently," said Nathan Pilgrim, IT Manager for Brisbane Girls Grammar School, a private institution based in Brisbane, Australia, with more than 1150 students and 175 staff. "Symantec Mail Security for SMTP helps us protect against malicious code, phishing attacks, viruses and spam with virtually no false positives, ensuring the online safety of our students and maximizing the efficiency of our network."
With its award-winning Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam technology, Symantec Mail Security for SMTP 5.0 provides enterprises with a multi-layered spam defense that employs more than 20 filtering technologies, including spam signatures, heuristics, reputation filters, language identification and proprietary methods, with automatic updates occurring within every 10 minutes. The technology also enables organizations to achieve high detection rates of 95 percent and 99.9999 percent accuracy rates against false positives, allowing companies to safely delete spam without review.
Powerful new content filtering capabilities simplify the enforcement of corporate usage policies, as well as compliance with legal and regulatory requirements. Administrators can conduct regular expression and keyword scanning of more than 200 recognized attachment types, including ZIP files, executables, processing, spreadsheet and presentation file formats. Symantec Mail Security for SMTP 5.0 also automatically determines the true file type of an attachment through direct physical inspection rather than by extension or MIME type, which prevents malicious senders from attempting to bypass attachment filters with the renaming of a malicious attachment extension to a more commonly used extension (for example, changing the file from .exe to .doc).
The browser-based interface of the product echoes that synergy. Full integration of the various security modules has been accomplished and management has been streamlined to the point that securing e-mail can become a mostly automated background task. That capability is further evidenced by the inclusion of zero-day protection schemes, based upon Symantec’s real-time network, which keeps the software signatures up to date as security flaws are detected on the company’s worldwide network.
In addition, new graphical message auditing allows administrators to perform advanced tracking across multiple scanners in their network. E-mail messages can be searched by subject, date and time range, envelope sender/recipient, disposition, next hop IP, and more. The message tracking feature also provides an instant summary of the action performed on the message and for more detailed information, administrators can easily drill down to see a comprehensive, organized view of messages’ flow through the system.
Symantec Mail Security for SMTP 5.0 takes it a step further with outbound mail scanning. Any mail leaving the organization is also passed through the Mail Security product. That chore prevents worms and viruses from spreading, e-mail server hijacking and, most importantly, allows a company to enforce compliance rules. Compliance has become the latest buzzword in the IT industry, but it is a buzzword with teeth. Compliance is driven by legislative requirements that are targeted at several business lines, from health-care establishments in the form of HIPAA to financial companies in the form of Sarbanes-Oxley.
Administrators will find a powerful reporting engine included with the product. Reports can be customized to highlight critical elements, document mail server loads, identify attacks and determine return on investment. Reporting, like many other features of the product, is wizard-driven and offers a concise methodology for generating and saving reports. The initial design of the product will offer separate licensing for anti-spam and antivirus capabilities, allowing companies to buy just the capabilities needed.
Symantec Enterprise Messaging Management
Symantec is the first company to deliver complete, end-to-end Enterprise Messaging Management capabilities, keeping messaging systems and data both secure and readily available. Symantec Enterprise Messaging Management provides industry-leading products and services designed to help eliminate unnecessary costs by reducing large volumes of unwanted spam, stopping viruses and worms, automatically managing the lifecycle of older messages through archiving, and by helping to keep customers’ communications infrastructures resilient against failure.
To ensure the most up-to-date protection and reduce total cost of ownership, Symantec Mail Security for SMTP 5.0 is supported by Symantec Security Response, the world’s leading Internet security research and support organization, leverages sophisticated threat and early warning systems to provide customers with comprehensive, global, 24×7 Internet security expertises to proactively guard against today’s blended Internet threats.
The key features Symantec Mail Security for SMTP 5.0 offers the channel are found with the product’s overall ease of use and integrated intelligence. What’s more, since the product is software-based, scalability is as easy as adding more powerful hardware. That makes the product suitable for businesses of any size.
For organizations securing heterogeneous environments, Symantec Mail Security for SMTP 5.0 provides support for a broad range of operating system platforms, including Microsoft Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003, Sun Solaris 9 and 10, and Red Hat Linux ES/AS 3.0.
Availability
The Symantec Mail Security Enterprise Edition bundle includes several deployment options to protect the SMTP gateway — the primary entry point for Internet-borne threats — with the Symantec Mail Security 8200 Series appliance, Symantec Mail Security for SMTP 5.0 software and Symantec Hosted Mail Security. In addition, to protect e-mail on internal mail servers from threats and inappropriate e-mail content, Symantec Mail Security for Microsoft Exchange and Symantec Mail Security for Domino ensure tight integration for real-time, on-demand and scheduled scans of the message store.
While the need has been clearly identified for businesses to enact e-mail security, few products on the market approach what Symantec has accomplished with a single, centrally managed product.
To help smooth sales, Symantec is offering 30-day free trials of the advanced capabilities. Users can then buy official upgrades to activate the features beyond the trial period.
Symantec Mail Security for SMTP 5.0 is scheduled to be available in May through Symantec’s worldwide network of value-added authorized resellers, distributors and systems integrators. Organizations can be connected with Symantec’s resellers and distributors in their areas by visiting the Symantec Solution Provider locator at http://enterprisesecurity.symantec.com.