June 7, 2007

FEATURE EDITORIAL

The Convergence of Content & Security in Corporate Messaging

MessageGate, Inc., recently released an extensive study that uncovers top issues and concerns surrounding information security and IT governance for enterprise messaging.

The MessageGate MarketInsight study, entitled Reshaping Information Security: The Convergence of Content & Security in Corporate Messaging, is based on multiple events in collaboration with The Roundtable Network where more than 40 executive-level participants discussed the challenges of email and messaging governance. The participants represented a broad range of industries with an average company size of 25,000 employees and over $13 billion in revenue.

According to the report, IT and security professionals face two major forces related to enterprise messaging: (1) A content deluge due to growing volumes of electronic documents that must be retained, stored and made accessible for retrieval. (2) A security deficiency caused by ever worsening end-user habits as it relates to the use and misuse of enterprise messaging tools.

“Security and IT professionals clearly have a challenging road in front of them to balance corporate governance and user requirements for email and corporate messaging,” says Robert Pease, vice president of marketing for MessageGate. “How this balance will be achieved has yet to be seen, but there are consistent themes and best practices emerging to get the conversation started.”

According to MessageGate, five key trends were uncovered during the event that will further define the role of information security going forward:

• Information security and IT have to build expertise in records retention, electronic discovery and legal matters to better manage legal requests and compliance.
• The end-user is essential. How employees use available technology and their awareness of authorized usage is more of a concern than the underlying technology itself.
• The next generation of employees will enter the workforce with personal laptops, mobile devices and software instead of having them provided by the company, creating a new level of control and security issues that IT departments must be prepared to meet.
• Email is not going to be displaced by another mechanism of communication, but it will be augmented. Enterprise messaging will expand to include instant messaging, text messaging and other forms of Internet-based communication and collaboration.
• Companies must have the organizational will to embrace governance issues and be proactive in addressing them, versus treating them as bad news to be avoided.

The full MessageGate MarketInsight report is available free online.

New Image Spam Techniques Identified

MessageLabs, a provider of integrated messaging and Web security services to businesses worldwide, announced this week the findings of its MessageLabs Intelligence Report for May 2007. In this report, the data shows an increase in sudden spam surges, or ‘spam spikes’. Virus and phishing rates increased this month, and while spam rates decreased overall, MessageLabs identified new image spam techniques using image-hosting sites.

Spam spikes occur when individual domains are targeted in a particularly aggressive spam attack. In one spam spike that lasted only 11 hours, more than 10,000 spam messages were attempted, accounting for more than 75 percent of the total messages received by the domain during the entire period. This type of attack is a threat to enterprises and can be detrimental to small-and medium-sized businesses resulting in an overload of email servers. It can defeat appliance-based anti-spam systems that rely heavily on signatures created over a long period of time to counteract the attacks. A spam spike is designed to increase the amount of spam that gets through a network while a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack disrupts connectivity. However, a spam spike can have an effect similar to that of a DDoS attack.

“This month the bad guys continued with their aggressive attacks by developing new tactics to fly under the radar and cause the most damage,” said Mark Sunner, chief security analyst for MessageLabs. “With the increase in spam spikes and new techniques with image spam, it is crucial for businesses to take a multi-layered security approach among email, Web and IM to protect their employees and their systems completely from these malicious attacks.”

Analysis of this month’s data showed that spammers continue to innovate and employ new methods to elude traditional anti-spam solutions. Rather than embedding images in the body of an email message, spammers are now hosting images on sites that do not require registration and include links to those sites or an HTML image in the email message. The group using this new image spam technique is the same group responsible for the recent abuse of Imageshack. Without registration requirements or validation of image sources on such hosting sites, MessageLabs predicts that this scheme will continue.

The May 2007 MessageLabs Intelligence Report provides greater detail on all of the trends and figures noted above, as well as more detailed geographical and vertical trends. Click here for the full report.

IN THE NEWS

Azaleos Offers On-Demand Microsoft Exchange Reporting and Visualization

Azaleos Corporation this week launched a self-service, customer-facing Web portal integrating real-time monitoring, reporting, and trouble ticketing for Microsoft Exchange 2003 and 2007 managed solutions.

ViewXchange is a software-as-a-service component of Azaleos’ OneStop Services for monitoring and managing Microsoft server infrastructure deployed on customer premises. The newly updated Azaleos ViewXchange version 3.0 includes:

• ViewXchange Reporting — Monthly “Email as a Utility” Reports of Microsoft Exchange health;
• ViewXchange Visualization — Real-time Exchange, Active Directory, System and Storage analysis;
• ViewXchange Ticketing — Integrated Exchange management trouble ticketing capabilities.

The new ViewXchange services, accessible by Web browsers, are immediately available to customers from the Azaleos support portal and leverage new Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 XAML Browser application technologies.

We welcome your ideas and your news for Messaging Newswire’s News & Trends in Email Security. Let us know what you think by sending your comments to editorial@messagingnews.com. Written or compiled by Stephanie Jordan. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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