by G Hunt | Sep 29, 2014 | Spam News, SpamTitan News
Galway, IE, Sept 29th 2014 – SpamTitan Technologies, a leading producer of business email and web security solutions, today announced the availability of ArcTitan, a powerful cloud based email archiving solution targeted at helping small and medium sized enterprises. The solution integrates seamlessly with most existing corporate email mail servers in use today including including MS Exchange 07/13,Lotus Domino, Kerio, MDeamon, Zimbra, Google Apps, Office 365.
In today’s corporate world, email remains the most critical business application. ArcTitan provides a simple yet powerful solution to offload email storage, streamline search and compliance needs, and give users permissions-based access to any email message. ArcTitan is simple to access and requires little administrative effort. These comprehensive features ensure ease of use and take the burden off of system administrators. With ArcTitan businesses have peace of mind that they have a secure copy of every email, even if deleted from servers”, said Ronan Kavanagh, CEO, SpamTitan Technologies.
With non-compliance regulations bringing fines and threats of imprisonment, businesses are looking to deploy systems that archive email communications in a compliant way. For many organisations, this can become an organisational and storage nightmare. ArcTitan helps organizations in highly regulated industries ensure compliance in the case of an audit. “Most archiving legislation now calls for a 7 year retention period, these regulations and penalties mean organisations are often under pressure to find a solution that allows them to comply but in the easiest and most affordable way”.
Outside of regulated industries, ArcTitan can help organizations comply with acts of legislation such as the Federal Rules for Civil Disclosure and the EU´s General Data Protection Regulation. Under the EU´s General Data Protection Regulation, organizations that collect, process or retain the personal data of EU citizens will be subject to privacy and security laws similar to those in regulated industries. Furthermore, with ArcTitan´s fast search and retrieval engine, data access requests allowed by the Regulation can be conducted quickly and more efficiently than with other data storage methods.
ArcTitan has been designed with both the flexibility and control organizations need to meet changing business requirements. The ArcTitan solution delivers the following benefits:
- Peace of mind –robust and redundant hosting as the Infrastructure is built on Amazons Virtual Private Cloud on AWS. We also do backups of our whole infrastructure.
- Complete Security
- Mail is fully encrypted, you can use TLS Encryption to send us your email, and when it is stored, it is stored encrypted using AES 128 encryption.
- We use passwords that are hashed and encrypted to control access with inbuilt certificate management and delegated management.
- Disaster Recovery – should it arise that any event destroys your on premises mail server with ArcTitan you have an off-site back up with a global enterprise level infrastructure
- Reduce IT Budget – ArcTitan removes the cost of provisioning, management and upgrading hardware. With ArcTitan all of these costs are removed.
Highlighted features of ArcTitan include:
- Unlimited cloud based email archiving including inbound/outbound/internal email, folders, calendar and contacts
- Comprehensive Policy based archiving, including customizable retention periods and policies based on user, content and attachments plus many more Email Discovery – Easy email, file, contact based search and retrieval.
- Full Email Audit Capabilities
- Outlook plug in – allow users search their archive from their Outlook clients.
- NTML based single sign on for Windows users Bulk email import from PST, EML, MBOX and MSG Bulk email export to EML, PST, MSG, PDF, TIFF format Restore, delete and print options
- Safe search and automated search options
- Active Directory, LDAP, IMAP and Google Authentication options
- Secure- TLS encryption of email to ArcTitan, AES Encrypted Archive, Superfast Search™ – email compressed, Zipped, message de-duplication, attachment de-duplication allowing for the fastest search and retrieval Hosted Securely on Amazon AWS Web console access with multi-tiered and granular access options, you decide user access permissions.
- SMTP, IMAP, Milter, POP Connectors
“Using the near limitless capacity of the cloud for email archiving and search makes perfect sense and with ArcTitan it just couldn’t be simpler, more secure or cost effective” said Kavanagh. ArcTitan provides an extra layer of protection to the organisation. With ArcTitan Users can search, view and retrieve their email even from their own Outlook client. The solution also includes full email search functionality and legislative compatibilities for e-discovery, retention and audit compliance. The benefits far outweigh the low cost of setup (virtually nil) and ongoing costs.
by G Hunt | Jun 4, 2014 | SpamTitan News
In its 28th Virus Bulletin Test SpamTitan Earns Top 5 position based on High Spam Catch Rate of 99.81% and 0% False Positive Rate.
Galway, Ireland and Tampa, FL – June 4th 2014. Today SpamTitan Technologies announced the company’s email security solution has earned the VBSpam+ certification from Virus Bulletin, a leading security industry test. This is SpamTitans 28th consecutive Virus Bulletin antispam award and 4th VBSpam+ award for exceptional performance.
This month Virus Bulletin tested 15 anti-spam solutions looking at both spam catch rates and false positive rates. In addition to winning its 28th consecutive award, the report noted that SpamTitan was awarded a VBSpam+ award because of its zero false positive rate and high spam catch rate of 99.81%.
“When looking at deploying an email security solution, it’s important to evaluate vendors that have been validated by an independent, third-party such as Virus Bulletin,” said Ronan Kavanagh CEO SpamTitan Technologies. Commenting on the SpamTitan May test results Martin Grooten, Test Director said that SpamTitan anti-spam had ‘yet again no false positives and a spam catch rate that was only marginally lower than in the last test. The Irish product is thus well deserving of its fourth VBSpam+ award’.
by G Hunt | Apr 1, 2014 | SpamTitan News
SpamTitan Earns 27th Consecutive Virus Bulletin Antispam Award
Galway, Ireland and Tampa, FL – April 1st 2014. SpamTitan Technologies a world leader in business email and web security solutions today announced its business anti spam solution SpamTitan has been awarded its 27th consecutive Virus Bulletin certification in the VBSpam Awards.Virus Bulletin staff tested SpamTitan along with 14 other full antispam products from multiple countries for spam catch rates, false positive rates and the ability to handle ‘newsletters’ – updates and notifications from various organizations that had been explicitly subscribed to. SpamTitan once again finds itself with a top-five final score with both an excellent spam catch rate of 99.85% and a normal false positive rate of 0% . READ MORE
by G Hunt | Mar 10, 2014 | SpamTitan News
Tampa, FL and Galway, Ireland – 10th March 2014. SpamTitan Technologies will release v6.01 in April, a feature rich release of the award winning spam filter that offers considerable enhancements in usability, security and network management. With centralized management and control, and flexible on-premises or cloud deployment options, SpamTitan continues to deliver incredibly cost-effective and manageable capabilities. SpamTitan 6.1 due to be release early April will offer businesses enhanced and even more powerful email security with additional outbound mail relaying features, improved Application controls, and multiple UI enhancements.
We're really excited here at SpamTitan Technologies," said Sean Doherty Senior Product Developer . "We've put a lot of time and effort into the creation and launch of SpamTitan 6.1 it will be so rewarding to see all that hard work come to fruition in delivering these new features to our customers."
As part of the release of SpamTitan 6.1 in April users will see the introduction of advanced policy based rate controls which will allow the rejection or deferral of messages based on a number of criteria further protecting the system from spammers or spam-programs (also known as "spam-bots") that send large amounts of email to the server in a small amount of time.
SpamTitan 6.1 also sees the addition of support for sender based smarthosts. Sender dependent smarthosts provide the ability to relay mail outbound from a particular domain or email address through a specific relay or smarthost. This is used to ease the management of a single mail server with aliases, security, and Internet access rather than maintaining numerous local mail servers.
Another significant feature includes increased delegated administration functions and added support for outbound IP Delivery Pools providing increased protection for an organisations IP reputation and consequently increasing spam catch rate.
"Our mission here at SpamTitan Technologies is to provide secure, reliable and affordable email security solutions to our customers," said Eddie Monaghan, Channel Manager. "We're taking a very customer-centric approach to developing SpamTitan continually implementing customer feedback and feature requests into new product releases, I think that will really shine through in our feature-rich SpamTitan 6.1. Although the company hasn't specified an official launch date yet, we expect SpamTitan 6.1 will be available to all new and existing users within the next couple of weeks."
by G Hunt | Mar 4, 2014 | SpamTitan News
Tampa, FL and Galway, Ireland – 4th Mar 2014. What are some of the threats to your network security from social media and should you cut off your employee’s access to social media sites? How can SMB owners or IT guys protect the network security of the company? SpamTitan recently sponsored a survey by Osterman Research of 157 companies with an average of 1,470 employees as to perceptions about and experiences with malware. Here we look at a couple of observationnewss drawn from that report related to social media.
Perception of Social Media Threats
The survey shows that 14% of malware infections over the period November 2012-November 2013 were via social media and other interactive and collaborative type sites (i.e. Web 2.0). The graph below presents the results. As we can see, web surfing and social media are closely related in terms of the risks associated. Web surfing is the number one method by which companies are infected, social media platforms draw victims in.
How do companies perceive the risk-versus-benefit of social media?
More than half of the companies surveyed regard the leading social media sites to be legitimate business applications. This should mean they should not cut off access, because people might need those sites for their work.
Among the companies that consider these sites useful some have nonetheless written guidelines or implemented technology to these block these sites include:
- LinkedIn 21%
- YouTube 36%
- Facebook 40%
- Twitter 45%
- Skype 47%
As you can see, in the case of LinkedIn and Skype, some of these companies have cut off their access, yet they deem them useful. This suggests that their security policies and business policies do not line up. Contrast that with YouTube and Twitter where companies have not cut off when they should not.
Network Security issues with Social Media in the workplace.
The major security threat with social media is the same as with spam email: people’s curiosity, their sense of trust, and a lack of adequate security training. People have a tendency to trust these sites, because they are so well-known, considered reputable and people are not always aware of the dangers there. Plus there is the presumption to trust someone you know or someone who knows someone you know, which is how spammers gain access to post links on your wall. In security circles, the underlying issue is called “transitive trust.” The average popular website links to all sorts of sites and services, with the typical home page featuring lots of third-party links. Each of those links could potentially be used by hackers for malicious intent. Your website or service is only as secure as its weakest link – literally!. Transitive-trust hacking is not new. It occurs every time a banner ad running on an innocent website ends up linking to a malicious malware laden website.
The concept was considered in Clara Shih’s book ‘The Facebook era’ although a heavily business focused book it is very readable and supported by credible research.
She writes: Consider this example of transitive trust: In trying to reach Graham, I discover that we both know Kelly. Because Kelly trusts me, and Graham trusts Kelly, Graham is more likely to “transitively” trust me if Kelly provides a warm introduction or I at least mention Kelly when reaching out to Graham. Not actually knowing me himself, Graham doesn’t trust me as much as he trusts Kelly, but … I don’t need him to trust me just yet. All I need is to get my foot in the door, and my product, service, or personality hopefully can do the rest. I just need a chance to be heard.
Transitive trust is not a new concept; in fact, it is how human beings have been making important decisions since the dawn of civilization. The challenge in the past was about discovery. I might have had to ask a lot of people before I found someone who knew Graham well enough to provide an introduction. Social networking sites bring transparency and efficiency to discovering mutual ties.
Facebook and LinkedIn encourage you to friend or make contacts with people who you do not know directly. They do this if you give them access to your email contacts plus they match you up with people who have a common contact with you on their site. This way hackers can gain access to post message on your wall. Twitter does not have this problem, as you cannot post tweets directly on someone else´s wall. However anyone can post tweets and direct them to hashtags (#), which is where your employees would find them as they read about different topics.
LinkedIn and Twitter shorten the URLs you post there. As they do this, they say they check for malware. For example, when they block a site, LinkedIn says: “This link has been reported as participating in malicious behaviour or abuse. Facebook also says they scan for malware, but that did not prevent the Zeus virus from infecting users on their site last year. This virus waits until you visit a bank website and then steals your user id and password. If that person is your company financial controller or bookkeeper, that could be a big problem.
What about security issues relating to apps?
One of the inherent weaknesses with Facebook is that the apps that you install there can have access to post links on your wall. So they can post seemingly harmless links to infected sites without the user knowing that. Your Facebook friends will then see that link. Facebook has too many apps to scrutinize each carefully.
Finally, whatever defences you put in place, such as blocking sites completely or selectively blocking categories of sites – these are not going to work when people are using their own devices outside your network. They can infect their tablet or smartphone and then send that out in company mail inadvertently with a web email client or when they attach via VPN and use their mobile device to send company.
Wrapping up, one can deploy technology and improve security training to help mitigate the risks of social media. But it is probably not a good idea to cut off access to social media, as most business, news, and culture is or has moved online and people need to be able to gain access to that for work. Security is the most important focus area for business and IT decision makers in the context of their email and web solutions. Because of the significant potential for malware and other threats to impact organizations as they enter through corporate email systems, web applications, and social media tools – and the enormous potential for financial and other damage they can cause – decision makers must focus heavily on the specific solutions that will be employed, whether these solutions will be part of an integrated suite of solutions or implemented on a best-of-breed basis, and the models that will be used to deliver them.
