Nemx SecurExchange

Nemx Power Tools for Exchange Server

May 2005

We would like to take this opportunity to share with you some tips and provide information about additions and improvements to Nemx SecurExchange and Power Tools and how these enhancements can benefit you in dealing with the various threats within your Exchange organization. These threats are more than just spam, viruses, and Exchange Server interrogation attacks. Today’s world is little different, as you now must be conscious of the consequences of the exposure of confidential or sensitive data, non compliance to federal or industry standards, and legal action over sexual and racial harassment. This is where Nemx comes in, being your total email content security watchdog and giving you Total Email Peace of Mind™.


Nemx pushes into the broader “intelligent email monitoring” market

Those of you familiar with Nemx know us for our PowerTools for Exchange lineup of products that have provided a powerful yet flexible defense against spam and viruses for over a decade. As the dangers, tricks and strategies of spammers and virus propagators have evolved Nemx has more than kept pace with enhancements to PowerTools that have allowed us to keep one step ahead with some of the most sophisticated and advanced tools on the market.

Today, businesses are recognizing the potentially disastrous consequences, and huge cost, associated with everything from the exposure of sensitive information to compliance violations and any form of harassment via email. There is growing concern over issues of corporate liability, risk, content compliance and security related to both the deliberate and inadvertent misuse of email. To protect against these risks it’s imperative to monitor every message, including internal email, and take appropriate measures before the message is delivered.

To meet these new challenges head on Nemx has launched the SecurExchange suite of intelligent email monitoring products. Our customers will recognize many of the most important features in PowerTools are also in SecurExchange. That’s because SecurExchange leverages the best of the PowerTools technology – indeed the core content analysis and virus scanning engines have their heritage in PowerTools. Where the application focus of these technologies and tools for PowerTools was primarily to fight spam, in SecurExchange we have and will continue to enhance the intelligent content analysis techniques and our Smart Action Trigger™ technology to align the email monitoring capabilities of SecurExchange with the market’s need for rigorous compliance and active policy management capabilities to mitigate the risk and potential liabilities against their businesses. But, of course, SecurExchange will continue to offer the most effective anti-spam and anti-virus capabilities as well.

Over time, we will discontinue further development for PowerTools and the product will be replaced by SecurExchange. For our PowerTools customers that maintain their annual support and maintenance agreements with Nemx, you can receive an upgrade to the most functionally equivalent SecurExchange product offering. You will not lose any functionality with the upgrade.

Visit our recently updated web site at www.nemx.com for more information about SecurExchange and how Nemx delivers on the promise of Total Email Peace of Mind™


Tips and How Tos:

Virus Outbreaks:

When a virus outbreak occurs (like the Sober virus last week), the number of messages arriving to internal users or to the administrator because of a “faked” return address generated by a mass mailing virus can become quite excessive. This heavy load of unwanted messages can bog down your Exchange Server affecting everyone and can steal valuable time away from your system administrator due to the high number of NDR or undelivered mail that is generated. One way to reduce this overhead is to not just clean the message of the infected attachment, but to delete the entire message when a mass mailing virus is detected. SecurExchange is one of the few Exchange AV products to classify the message based on the nature of the virus infection and to give you the ability to delete the entire message.


Foreign Character Sets / Senders:

We all know that spam takes many forms and controlling spam requires an understanding of what and where your true business email comes from. A substantial amount of spam mail originates from countries other than your place of business or contains foreign content. In looking at your true business email, there may be opportunities to eliminate spam by preventing mail arriving from countries that you have no business partners or correspondence from or that arrive in a language you can not interpret or even display. If you don't do business with customers in these countries, then you can usually safely block all email from them and know that you are blocking unwanted email.

To filter out a subset of foreign email (or even by ISP) you can do any of the following:

Country or ISP Based RBLs: There are a number of RBL service provides that make available specific black list databases based on the IP addresses assigned within that country or Internet Service Provider. By enabling these RBL providers in Nemx’s Spam RBL configuration, can reduce the amount of spam received. See the following knowledgebase article for additional information:

http://www.nemx.com/KnowledgeBase/article.aspx?id=10175

Foreign Language Detection: Buried within email messages is the definition of the character set that the message was created with. By defining Spam Header rules to look for specific foreign character sets, you can detect and eliminate messages that “make no sense” to your business model. See the following knowledge base article for header definitions and their corresponding values:

http://www.nemx.com/KnowledgeBase/article.aspx?id=10085

Updates:


Quarantine Release Form and Outlook 2003

The Quarantine Release form has been updated to address all known issues when running the form in an Outlook 2003 environment. Version 1.4 of the Quarantine Release form is part of the complete download for SecurExchange and Nemx Power Tools. For additional information on this update and how to determine the current version of the form see

http://www.nemx.com/KnowledgeBase/article.aspx?id=10170.

Some of you may be quarantining messages to a public folder or to a separate mailbox. When accessing these mailboxes or folders from your personal mailbox in Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2002 with SP3 applied, you may experience inconsistencies with the operation of the form. This is an Outlook issue that can overcome by setting some options in Outlook via the Options dialogs or the registry itself. See the following knowledge base article to allow shared folder/mailbox access to the quarantine items:

http://www.nemx.com/KnowledgeBase/article.aspx?id=10169

Audit Logs:

Audit logs created via Actions contain a wealth of information on the nature of the trigger of a rule or concept. When creating an Audit log you have the option of saving the trigger information to an ODBC compliant database or to a locally accessible file. The file option stores this information in a comma separate value format, however due to the formatting of the triggered message, the log entry may be incorrectly formatted. This can result in errors while reviewing the log in applications like Excel, or some third party report generators. The latest build of Nemx SecurExchange and Power Tools addresses this problem, ensuring that all audit log entries are correctly formatted.


Online Knowledge Base: A Knowledge Base section has been added to our web site to assist you in getting the information you need when you need it. The Knowledge Base is categorized by product, component and environment and further by the type of issue. The KB is fully searchable and contains articles on support, presales, how tos, and general product information.

You can access the Knowledge Base via the following link:

http://www.nemx.com/KnowledgeBase

We hope that this newsletter and How Tos will help you in your content management challenges and your daily battles with the effects of spam and viruses. If you have any thoughts on how Nemx SecurExchange and Power Tools can better your fight, by all means please let us know. Many of the features in the product come from customer suggestions, so keep them coming!