Spam Spam Spam ................ go for the kill !!

We all will accept that spam is an extremely unpleasant thing. Every day finding our mailbox flooded with absolutely useless mails can be annoying. Apart from these Spam is one of the easiest way to get access to corporate data. For example a file attached to an e-mail message can be simply opened from the mail client program. And if the attached file is an executable program then it will be run automatically. The danger is that a file from an unknown sender can easily contain viruses, works or spywares(nowadays security threats come bundled practically in every type of file including office documents or mp3 audio files). That means a spam sent to 1000 untrained employees in a company is like 1000 loop holes to get inside corporate network. A success rate of even 0.001% for the spammer could lead to a huge loss to corporate confidential data and profit.

Some of the areas of concern with Spam Emails on the raise….

• Threat to Corporate data and Resources.
• Spam mails eating up employees precious time.
• Important business communication lost amongst a deluge of spam emails leading to business loss.
• Spam mails choking internet bandwidth leading to increased internet costs.
• Massive delays in sending and receiving emails.

Today best way to stay away from the security threats is to proactively block them before they reach the untrained corporate users / corporate network. Ideally one should consider to invest in anitspam solution which would be placed at the mail gateway.Todays antispam solution protects a corporate from spam and virus mails plus can do content filtering to a certain extent.Most of the antispam solution uses reputation services/ blacklist database to filter out spam mails. One should also be aware to choose an antispam solution with lesser false positive rates making sure that important business mails are not caught as spam.Links for some of the solutions which I feel could help you out on this are as below.......

http://www.postini.com

http://www.ironport.com

http://www.symantec.com/specprog/brightmail/index.html