As more employees discover and use email, their
email addresses eventually get harvested by spammers. As the "killer"
application for businesses on Internet, email is to valuable to abandon to
degradation by spammers. There simply must be some defense against email
abuse. Because mail abuse techniques and defenses are constantly evolving,
many organizations do not have the resources to build and maintain their own
mail abuse defenses.
There are numerous tools used by mail abusers to discover weaknesses in
mail servers and for sending spam are increasingly sophisticated, applying
continuous pressure on mail server defenses. Stealth Spam Protection service
allows any organization's Internet mail services to benefit from the latest
mail abuses defenses developed and maintained by Stealth Spam Protection mail
systems experts.
Using the Stealth Spam Protection techniques there is a
90+ % reduction in spam. Stealth is a seriously effective solution
to your virus and spam problems.
Below we describe some of the techniques Stealth Spam Protection employs
to defend against mail abuse.
MAPS, "Mail Abuse
Prevention System", is a group of 3
databases at www.Mail-Abuse.org that contains
Internet addresses that can be used to reject
mail. The 3 databases are:
Black
holes is a
database of known sources of SPAM that
repeatedly send out SPAM and have been the
target of complaints.
Relays
("RSS" relay spam stopper) is a database of
mail servers that indiscriminately accept mail
from any other mail server and forward the
mail to any other mail server. This process is
called "open mail relaying". Spammers hijack
open relay servers to deliver spam since the
spammer can obscure himself behind the open
relay as the real source of the spam. The
operator of the open relay mail server is then
implicated in the mail abuse as well as having
his mail server inundated by tons of SPAM
traffic, and the complaints.
Dial-ups
("DUL") is a database of world-wide Internet
addresses reserved for accessing Internet by
dial-up users. Recently, the Internet
addresses of DSL telephone subscribers and
Internet TV cable subscribers have also been
added to this DUL database. Normally, dial-up
users should send their outgoing mail to their
ISP's mail server for forwarding to Internet.
But mail abusers on DUL addresses bypass their
ISP mail server and send spam directly to open
relay servers and any other mail server.
In the above diagram, Stealth
queries the MAPS database for the presence of
the Internet address of the sender's mail
server. If the address is in MAPS, the email is
rejected.
Implementation of Stealth
Spam Protection is technically very
simple and without disruption to a client's
normal mail operations.
A client
implements Stealth simply by
modifying the client's DNS MX
("mail exchanger") records to
route the client's mail traffic to
ITS Group Information Technology first rather
than to the client's mail server.
Note that in
fact ITS Group Information Technology provides
two identical Stealth servers, a
primary and a secondary, for
redundancy. If the primary Stealth
is unavailable, the secondary
Stealth will accept the mail.
ITS Group Information Technology's Stealth receives the
incoming mail from Internet,
performs mail abuse validations,
and forwards the accepted mail
directly to the client's mail
server. The delay through Stealth
is typically only a few seconds
for a message with an average size
of 20 kilobytes.
In the case
where the client's mail server is
temporarily unavailable, Stealth
will hold the client's mail until
the client's mail server become
available again.
Clients whose
mail servers are not continuously
connected to Internet can use
Stealth both for its defenses and
for its mail relay features. The
client's off-line mail server
connects to Internet temporarily
to exchange incoming and outgoing
mail with Stealth. After the
client's mail server goes
off-line, Stealth scans the
outgoing mail and delivers it to
the final Internet destinations.
Give our sales team a call today
1-780-669-1548 or
e-mail Sales.
Protect Your
Business
Best E-Mail Protection
Protect your network and optimize
corporate email usage by stopping spam at the gateway.
