A locally developed e-mail security solution is being used to monitor over 10 million e-mails destined for corporate South Africa every day. Of these, around 94% are spam or viruses, and only 5% are legitimate.
The solution, Pinpoint SecureMail, was developed by managed Linux services and open source solutions provider, SYNAQ, on an open source platform.
According to SYNAQ technical director David Jacobson, corporate networks are constantly under threat from virus propagators and spammers who relentlessly develop aggressive new tactics to defeat traditional e-mail filtering solutions.
They regularly add new weapons to their arsenal to extract information from users, flood company mail servers, and cripple corporate IT infrastructures by camouflaging their vicious threats within innocuous-looking e-mails.
“We recognised that in order to counter the aggressive tactics of virus propagators and spammers, we would have to develop an e-mail security solution that could change as quickly as they do. By leveraging the flexibility of open source software and technologies, we have produced a security solution that is always up-to-date,” Jacobson says.
Pinpoint SecureMail incorporates a range of protection services (anti-virus, anti-spam, content control and anti-phishing) and acts as a first line of defence between the public Internet and a company's e-mail servers.
It scans e-mail using any combination of up to 14 different virus scanners that automatically update themselves every hour with the latest malware signatures.
It also identifies over 95% of spam using multiple techniques, including highly advanced heuristics and optical character recognition (OCR) for protection against the latest picture-embedded methodology used by spammers.
Pinpoint SecureMail is readily customisable to suit every company's needs. This could range from incorporating employee specific rules within company-wide filtering policies to unique notification procedures.
The solution comes standard with a fully functional, easy-to-use Web interface that provides detailed management reports and statistics, allows release of blocked e-mails, and offers a vast number of other functions.
“It requires no additional software, hardware or technical skills providing customers with a central, reliable, always up-to-date e-mail security solution that's easy to implement and even easier to manage,” Jacobson concludes.
Share