Uri Unplugged

OK, so I know you’re not sitting at your desk viewing porn all day, but if you suspect (or know) that users on your network might be so inclined, read on...

We all know the expensive pitfalls of pornography in the workplace. Most obviously, it’s intrusive, offensive, and wastes valuable work hours. But even more importantly, it can lead to legal issues involving hostile workplace environments (hello, sexual harassment lawsuits).

With the recent release of their anti-spam appliance Mail-SeCure™ v3.6, PineApp added Inappropriate Content Control, also know as Porn MegaFilter. It's essentially an anti-pornography engine that eliminates the dirty stuff from corporate email systems by automatically detecting and blocking incoming and outgoing pornographic pictures as well as pictures embedded in PowerPoint presentations, videos and other media. It can also identify email with links to child pornography websites, block them and notify the administrator that the link is being sent.

At RADirect, we’ve received feedback from quite a few customers who said they would purchase Mail-SeCure for this feature alone. I find this alarming, only because it demonstrates how pervasive pornography in the workplace really is.

So what about your organization? Is pornography a big issue? How do you measure its costs? Have you faced, or been threatened with, legal action as a result of it? Do send me your feedback.

Posted by Uri Zilberman at 01:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With Halloween season in full swing, it seems perfectly natural to have zombies on the mind. But while you may enjoy the treat of having one appear on your doorstep, candy bag in hand, it’s not nearly as entertaining when they turn tricks in your corporate network.

Spam zombies (what’s this?) created by increasingly sophisticated spammers/hackers can wreak major havoc by turning your computers into virtual spamming machines. And you often don’t know about it until it’s too late. These little guys pose a significant threat to your domain, and can possibly get you blacklisted.

Pretty spooky, huh?

PineApp, one of RADirect’s vendor partners for corporate email security, has created a neat little tool called the Zombie Detection System (ZDS) that allows you to test your network IP addresses for the presence of such zombies that could be generating spam messages and using your network to send them.

It’s quick, easy, and free, so try it out here.

And Have a Happy Halloween!

Posted by Lisa Cibellis at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We at RADirect get pretty excited when one of the products we sell wins an industry award. Sure, we can rave all day long to customers about how great a product is, but it means a heck of a lot more when that product has the industry accolades to back up our claims.

So naturally, I was thrilled to learn today that one of our enterprise network security products, the PineApp Mail-SeCure anti-spam appliance, is currently in the running for a title in Info Security Products Guide’s “2008 Product Excellence Awards” competition. It's nominated in two categories:

1. Best Anti-Spam Solution
2. Best Email Security Solution

Of course, we're already privy to the Mail-SeCure's award-worthiness. Not only do we rely on it for our own email security, but we've also seen it drastically reduce spam for many of our customers. In fact, one of our PineApp customers, a large ISP that trusts PineApp to handle their 65 million monthly mails, just bought their 4th Mail-SeCure unit (a 5080 model - the 'big dog'!).

Wanna See PineApp Win?

We do, and we've already cast our votes (yup, this one lets real users have a say!). You can vote, too. Just visit the online voting booth to vote for the PineApp Mail-SeCure as your pick for the best anti-spam solution and best email security solution.

Remember to cast your vote in both categories, and invite your spam-hating colleagues to vote too! All votes must be submitted by October 8th.

UPDATE - 10/17/07: The PineApp Mail-Secure has achieved "finalist" status in both categories! Winners will be honored at the Technosium 2008 event in Santa Clara, CA on January 30, 2008.

Good Luck, PineApp!

Posted by Lisa Cibellis at 01:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(Note from Uri: Today's post is contributed by RADirect Communications Manager Lisa Cibellis)

As RADirect’s communications manager, it’s my job to compile success stories and testimonials from satisfied customers. Although it’s always nice to hear how our team helped an organization solve a problem and save money, certain stories seem to make the term ‘success’ seem like an understatement.

One such story is that of Telepak Networks, a Jackson, Mississippi-based ISP with thousands of residential and business customers. Desperate to gain control over an increasing spam problem that was threatening their ability to do business, they recently came to RADirect in need of an easy to manage and cost-effective anti-spam appliance. With a load of approximately four million daily incoming emails, this was no small task.

RADirect’s solution was the PineApp Mail-Secure 5080 anti spam appliance, which Telepak diligently compared to competing offerings from well-known names such as Barracuda and McAfee.

In the end, our solution came in at about half the price (yes, you read that right!) of those competing solutions for the same functionality, and Telepak promptly deployed a trio of Mail-Secure units with little effort and immediate results. They learned that over 97% of their incoming mail was spam, and corporate users who previously received over 100 spam emails a day now receive none.

Needless to say, they couldn’t be happier, and neither could their relieved subscribers. As for RADirect, we just hope stories like these inspire other organizations to give our PineApp anti-spam appliance a try (we even offer a free 14-day trial!).

Read the complete Telepak Networks success story.

Posted by Lisa Cibellis at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I don’t know about you, but it feels like spam in my inbox is slowly creeping up, even though RADirect implemented an anti spam appliance on our network last year. It used to block over 98% of our spam, but now it feels like spammers are finding ways around it.

Just as I’m about to go to our engineers and ask them to try and tweak our appliance settings to improve its performance, I get an email from our anti spam appliance vendor, PineApp:

Subject: Unprecedented high levels of spam and image spam

Spam Doubles during the course of an hour
Spam reached unprecedented heights during the weekend of Nov. 18-19, more than doubling its usual intensity in a matter of hours. To give you an idea of how big the increase was, the graph below shows baseline traffic in one of the Commtouch Global Detection routers where you can see that in the morning it was at a fairly typical level, and then at 9:00 am, the required bandwidth jumped significantly, doubling within a single hour, and reaching peaks in a multi-wave pattern.

Image spam attacks intensify, grow more sophisticated
Spammers have unveiled new, sophisticated behavior for image spam, making use of text written in wavy lines (to fool OCR mechanisms) with patchwork-colored backgrounds (to fool other types of solutions). We have also identified “ASCII art” spam, with stock ticker symbols written out in numbers arranged as letters. These new techniques are almost impossible for traditional anti-spam technologies to catch. The attacks were unleashed on the Internet during the weekend in massive quantities, raising the spam and bandwidth count significantly. Commtouch anti-spam blocked some of these attacks, and missed some; however, due to the vast number of incidents, an above-average number of false negatives were reported.
The email goes on, but the gist of it is, there is a lot more spam, so even if detection rates are in the high 90s, you’re still going to see more spam in your inbox. On top of that, spammers are getting more sophisticated and anti spam solutions are constantly playing catch-up.

I did a quick search to try and verify this info with one of PineApp’s competitors and found this article in USA Today, citing stats from a variety of sources, including IronPort Systems. They agree that spam is increasing dramatically, and that it’s getting more and more sophisticated.

So the battle between spammers and anti spam solutions is intensifying. I just hope the latter will prevail (imagine what will happen to our world if not!). In parallel, I would like to see more legislation and real retributions against spammers, since it’s clear that we have to solve this problem at its roots.

Have you noticed any recent changes in the amount or type of spam reaching your inbox? What have you been doing to battle it? Post a comment and share your experiences.

Posted by Uri Zilberman at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)