by Jennifer Marsh | Mar 5, 2018 | Internet Security Updates, Spam News, SpamTitan News, TitanHQ News, TitanHQ Partner News
A new version of TitanHQ’s cloud-based anti-spam service and anti-spam software was released on March 5, 2018. SpamTitan version 7.00 includes patches for recently identified vulnerabilities in the ClamAV antivirus engine and a change to the primary AV engine used by the solution.
The primary anti-virus engine of SpamTitan version 7.00 is provided by the Romanian firm Bitdefender. Bitdefender is an award-winning antivirus engine that provides exceptional email protection against malware, viruses, and ransomware. Combined with the secondary AV engine – ClamAV – users benefit from excellent protection against email-based malware and ransomware attacks. The dual AV engines ensure malicious software is not delivered to end users’ inboxes via email attachments.
The change to Bitdefender was a natural choice and TitanHQ is planning to further its strategic relationship with the Romanian cybersecurity firm over the coming weeks and months. The change to the primary AV engine will be unnoticeable to current users, who will continue to be protected from malicious threats.
The update to the latest version will not happen automatically. Customers who have ‘prefetch of system updates’ enabled on their SpamTitan installations will be able to see the latest version in their list of available updates and can manually trigger the update to the new version. Customers who do not have that option enabled need to “check for updates” via their user interface.
Customers have been advised to read the documentation accompanying the latest version prior to installation as it includes important information on how the update should be applied. TitanHQ explains that it is not possible to update from v4 or v5 of the platform to SpamTitan version 7.00 without first installing version 6 of the platform.
Customers should note that the update must be performed before May 1, 2018 to ensure continued protection, as support for the Kaspersky AV engine – used in all versions of SpamTitan prior to v7 – will cease on that date. TitanHQ has also informed customers that support for v4 and v5 of SpamTitan will also stop on May 1, 2018.
SpamTitan v7.00 includes patches for the following vulnerabilities: CVE-2017-12374, CVE-2017-12375, CVE-2017-12376, CVE-2017-12377, CVE-2017-12379, CVE-2017-12380. All of those vulnerabilities exist in ClamAV. The latest version also improves protection against DoS attacks and should be applied as soon as possible. The update will take approximately 10-20 minutes to complete.
by Jennifer Marsh | Oct 30, 2017 | Spam News, SpamTitan News, TitanHQ News
New SpamTitan Review
Spam Filter Reviews, a website providing reviews of spam filtering solutions, has awarded TitanHQ’s SpamTitan with a glowing 4.9 gold star rating. The new SpamTitan review saw the product attract marks of 4.9/5 for both functionality and real-time emulation.
Each spam filtering product reviewed on the site is assessed on 18 different elements, with SpamTitan scoring highly on 16/18 of those elements.
The reviewers were particularly impressed with the ability to easily adjust scam scoring on all incoming emails, which allowed the spam filtering level to be fine-tuned to make spam filtering more aggressive or more lenient.
Another major plus was the ease at which quarantined messages can be checked. With any spam filtering solution, there will be false positives from time to time. Virus Bulletin reviews have shown SpamTitan’s false positive rate is particularly low – less than 0.03%. However, when legitimate messages do trigger the spam filter, checking those messages is straightforward.
In its review of SpamTitan, Spam Filter Reviews explained the ease at which quarantined messages can be safely viewed from the admin console. Users can view simple metrics such as the message date, recipient, envelope address, and message size, but also more detailed information using one of four different tabs.
SpamTitan lets users view the full HTML message, as well as the entire SMTP protocol header. If the email is genuine, users can quickly and easily release the message for delivery and whitelist the sender’s email address to ensure future messages are always delivered.
As Spam Filter Reviews points out, the ability to view the full body of a captured message is absent from many spam filtering solutions. This feature can save admin staff valuable time.
SpamTitan also rated particularly well on reporting. SpamTitan allows users to configure an extensive range of reports, providing users with all the information they need to measure inbound mail flow metrics. Spam Filter Reviews explained that many leading spam filtering solutions do not have such extensive spam reporting functionality. The ability to configure quarantine reports to show all messages since sign up or those captured since the last scheduled report was also praised, and found to be absent in many other spam filtering solutions.
Accessing the SpamTitan console was also found to be easy, regardless of the device being used. Since the control panel is full HTML, it can be easily accessed on mobile devices, while the admin console was found to be intuitive and easy to use.
Set up was also a quick and easy process, taking just 13 minutes. “13 minutes is extremely good considering the we had a previously MX record TTL of 5 minutes, so there is a reasonable likelihood that, if the domains TTL had previously been set to a lower TTL, the set up would have been even quicker.”
The only down point was the lack of link re-writing functionality, although due to the high degree of accuracy of the spam filter, this negative was somewhat mitigated.
Spam Filter Reviews’ SpamTitan review summarized the product saying, “All in all, SpamTitan is a very stable, clean platform with many additional features which makes an admin’s life a lot easier to manage user expectations,” also explaining “It is our comparative opinion that SpamTitan’s system is extremely under-rated as it’s clean, accurate and functionality full features certainly exceed and surpass some of the most well know Products on the market today.”
by TitanHQ News | Sep 5, 2017 | MSP News, Spam News, SpamTitan News, TitanHQ in the News, TitanHQ News
The 2017 Computing Security Awards ceremony will be taking place on October 12, 2017 in London. The gala event attracts cybersecurity firms from all over the world, all of which hope to leave with a prestigious award.
The Computing Security Awards are highly coveted. Each year, the best enterprise cybersecurity solutions are selected as finalists and are put to a public vote to determine the best loved, and most effective cybersecurity solutions. This year, there will be 33 awards presented to enterprise-class cybersecurity solution providers, resellers and distributors.
To be named as a finalist for the 2017 Computing Security Awards, a company must have gone the extra mile and developed a highly effective and easy to use solution to keep enterprises protected from an ever-increasing range of cyberthreats.
As always, the quality of the competition is strong. This year’s finalists include new products that have come to market in the past 12 months alongside tried and tested cybersecurity solutions that have been tweaked to improve performance and block more threats.
TitanHQ is proud to announce that its enterprise-class spam filtering solution – SpamTitan – has been named a finalist in the ‘Best Anti Spam Solution’ category of the 2017 Computing Security Awards.
“This recognition showcases the strength of the SpamTitan range of security solutions,” said Ronan Kavanagh, CEO, TitanHQ. “Our security solutions help thousands of companies worldwide to protect their organisations from malware, spam, phishing attacks and many other email and web threats. We provide powerful network security solutions that are easy to implement with multiple deployment options available.”
The winners of each category are decided by a public vote. Readers of Computer Security Magazine and other IT professionals are now being encouraged to vote for their favorite security products. Votes for each cybersecurity solution can be placed on this link until October 5, 2017.
About SpamTitan
The past 12 months has seen the number of new malware and ransomware variants grow at an extraordinary rate. Email spam volume has increased once again and email is now the attack vector of choice for cybercriminals.
2017 has already seen major attacks on businesses and some of the largest malware campaigns ever conducted. Many of those attacks have targeted employees via email. The need for an advanced spam filtering solution has never been greater.
The SpamTitan suite of cybersecurity solutions has been developed to offer enterprises the best possible protection against email-borne threats. With SpamTitan, enterprises are able to quickly and easily protect their end users and networks from all forms of email-based attacks.
The solution is flexible, scalable, easy to deploy and manage, blocks more than 99.9% of spam and malicious emails, and has an exceptionally low false positive rate. Inbound and outbound emails are subjected to a wide range of tests to ensure only genuine emails are delivered and enterprise users are protected from malware, ransomware, phishing and social engineering attacks.
SpamTitan has recently been awarded 5 stars by the Spiceworks community for the effectiveness of the solution, ease of use, and industry-leading customer support. SpamTitan has also collected no less than 37 consecutive Virus Bulletin Spam awards.
by TitanHQ News | Jan 11, 2017 | Spam News
TitanHQ has published a new data sheet for ArcTitan Cloud, detailing the features and benefits of this cost-effective, convenient, and secure email archiving solution for businesses.
Email Storage is a Nightmare for Most Businesses
Email has changed the way companies do business. Just a decade ago, businesses relied on letters and faxes, yet today, email is now serving those needs. Email accounts are now used to receive and send orders, store critical business data, and communicate with staff, clients, and customers.
Email accounts now contain a vast amount of data and access to that information needs to be maintained at all times. Given the volume of emails that are sent and received each day by each employee, storage is a major issue. Most medium to large businesses have to purchase a considerable amount of hardware just to store their emails. Storage requirements can also rapidly change, so additional capacity is always required to meet changing storage needs.
While sufficient storage can be purchased, it is not long before space is used, mailbox quotas are reached, servers start to become sluggish, and backups start to take an age to complete.
Good email practices can help, but employees are increasingly using email for document storage and are placing even greater pressures on email storage solutions.
While storage demands can be eased by deleting old and unwanted emails, businesses that are required to comply with the Sarbanes Oxley Act or other email archiving legislation may not have this option. Emails therefore need to be archived so they can be accessed at any time.
A lost email could be a major headache for a business, but if there is a legal dispute or an audit, a lost email could be catastrophic. Lost emails could result in significant fines for non-compliance and even imprisonment. With email archiving legislation often calling for emails to be stored for a minimum of seven years, many companies have frequent organizational storage nightmares.
Businesses can solve their storage needs with additional hardware and internal storage solutions, but recovering emails can prove problematic. If emails are not stored or archived correctly, searches can take an extraordinary amount of time. PST files can be a nightmare, especially if searches need to be performed or emails need to be regularly retrieved from archives. However, storing emails in SQL databases brings its own headaches. Costs can be excessive, databases often perform poorly, backups become exceedingly complex, and there is significant potential for data loss.
Fortunately, companies can solve their email storage needs by using a secure, cloud-based email archiving system: One that allows an unlimited number of emails to be securely stored, while also ensuring searches can be quickly performed and emails quickly and easily retrieved at any time.
Key Benefits of ArcTitan
ArcTitan Cloud from TitanHQ is a powerful, cloud-based email archiving solution that has been designed to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes, especially companies in heavily regulated industries where audits are to be expected.
While ArcTitan Cloud is designed for long term storage to ensure that no email is ever lost, emails can be quickly and easily retrieved at any time. With ArcTitan Cloud, organizations can do not have to cope with organizational storage headaches or setting up complex storage and backup systems.
ArcTitan Cloud requires very little on-site hardware, there are no complex installations (setup takes about 5 minutes), and employees are essentially provided with bottomless email accounts. The versatile storage solution is designed to grow with businesses, with no limits on storage space or the number of users.
To explain the features and benefits of ArcTitan Cloud, TitanHQ has produced a new data sheet for ArcTitan Cloud, covering the most important elements of the solution for quick and easy reference. If you are struggling with storage space, are unhappy with your current email storage or archiving solution, or are looking to cut the cost of email storage, ArcTitan Cloud could well be the solution you are looking for.
To find out more about TitanHQ’s innovative email archiving solution, download the new data sheet for ArcTitan Cloud on this link.
by titanadmin | Sep 8, 2016 | Spam News
Microsoft will stop providing updates for its SmartScreen spam email filters due to the failure of the filters to cope with modern email spam campaigns.
SmartScreen spam email filters have long be used with Outlook and Exchange but, from November 1st, they will be “deprecated” by Microsoft – meaning that the filters will no longer be provided or updated. In a statement released by Microsoft last week, the company said:
“As spammers have evolved and increased the volume and sophistication of their attacks, this type of spam prevention is no longer a useful way to prevent spam”. The company also acknowledged that there had been conflicts between SmartScreen and Microsoft´s own Exchange Online protection (EOP).
Microsoft first released its SmartScreen spam email filters in 2003. They direct email considered to be spam into Outlook’s junk folder. However, the filters are considered too slow to address modern spam campaigns, which launch in minutes and often hide their origins using “reputation high jacking”. This is despite many security flaws in Microsoft products.
Microsoft went to great lengths to avoid any confusion between the SmartScreen spam email filters and the SmartScreen site reputation protections that are part of the Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer browsers. Despite the similar “SmartScreen” name, they have different functions.
Microsoft´s statement said: “In Windows, Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer browsers, the SmartScreen Filter online protection feature helps consumers to stay protected from malicious websites and downloads.”
The deprecation of Microsoft´s SmartScreen spam email filter will mostly affect organizations using Exchange Server on premises. Microsoft suggests that organizations currently using SmartScreen can use Exchange Online Protection or a third-party solution as alternatives.
The company is recommending that organizations running Exchange Server on premises put together a plan to have replacement spam protection in place before November 1st. From that date, the SmartScreen spam email filters will remain operative but less and less effective at detecting spam email as time goes on.
Organizations looking to decrease the volume of spam they receive are advised to review our anti-spam tips. For organizations seeking an alternative solution to Microsoft´s SmartScreen spam email filters, you are invited to try SpamTitan free for fourteen days. Please contact your local area support team for more information about this offer.
by TitanHQ News | Aug 15, 2016 | Spam News, SpamTitan News, TitanHQ in the News, TitanHQ News
McDonalds (Philippines) is the latest fast food chain to choose TitanHQ as its partner to protect employees from phishing attacks.
McDonalds operates more than 500 restaurants in the Philippines and all of those restaurants will now be protected with TitanHQ’s anti-spam solution, SpamTitan. Under the terms of the agreement, TitanHQ has been tasked with keeping employee inboxes free from email spam and protecting its network from other email-borne threats such as malware and ransomware.
Email spam has declined in recent years following the take down of large botnets by international task forces, yet the threat from phishing has never been greater. The Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) has recently released a report that shows phishing attacks in 2016 have spiked. In the first quarter of the year, APWG reported there were more phishing attacks “than at any other time in history”.
Phishing attacks have also become far more sophisticated, making it harder for employees to identify phishing emails. Unfortunately, all it takes is for one employee to fall for a single phishing email for a network to be compromised. Employing a robust and powerful anti-spam solution has never been more important.
SpamTitan was chosen to protect all McDonalds restaurants in the Philippines for the excellent level of protection offered, but also due to the simplicity of the solution. As McDonalds (Philippines) IT manager Ramon Rivera III explains, “SpamTitan’s best feature is that it simply works as promised with immediate results. The product is incredibly powerful and yet simple to manage.”
The increase in phishing attacks and the rise in the use of ransomware has prompted many fast food chains to re-evaluate their cybersecurity defenses; however, it is not only employees that need to be protected.
McDonalds has recently announced that it will also be taking action to reduce the risk to customers who connect to its in-restaurant Wi-Fi networks. In order to protect minors, McDonalds will be implementing a web filtering solution to prevent users of its restaurant Wi-Fi networks from accessing pornography. All McDonalds restaurants are to be protected by a web filtering solution which will prevent inappropriate web content from being accessed by any of its customers.
McDonalds is setting an example which other fast food chains are following. After the decision to start offering family-friendly Wi-Fi was announced by McDonalds, Starbucks followed suit. The coffee shop chain is currently looking for a web filtering solution to ensure its coffee shop Wi-Fi networks are 100% family friendly.
by TitanHQ News | Apr 10, 2015 | MSP News, Spam News
What can SpamTitan anti spam do for Managed Service Providers? Interview with anti spam, email security, anti malware Steven Kenny, Head of Support Services, SpamTitan Technologies.
Can you start by telling us about SpamTitan?
Steven : SpamTitan began producing email security solutions over 15 years ago, and now provides powerful email and web security solutions to businesses worldwide. Security and networks have grown more complicated in the past 15 years, but SpamTitan has remained focused on delivering easy-to-use solutions that are comprehensive but not complex.Who do the experts turn to when they need a security solution? Seventy-three percent of SpamTitan’s customers are Managed Service Providers or system integrators. SpamTitans’ security solutions are used by network administrators and IT managers in 124 countries.
What Does the Email Threat Landscape Look Like Today for MSPs?
Steven : Email threats are increasing and getting more sophisticated, putting MSPs’ customers, their finances, and their identities at risk. MSPs may find their very survival as businesses under threat. Their antagonists, originally the hackers down the street, are now highly professional international crime gangs that are often based in Russia or China where law enforcement can’t get to them. Their attacks are getting increasingly sophisticated, with damage that might be evident immediately but sometimes isn’t apparent for years.
The most devastating attacks often start with a seemingly innocuous email. The recent Carbanak financial attack where a hacker group stole as much as $1 billion from banks and other financial companies worldwide since 2013 started with a simple phishing email. The target breach from last year was a massive assault that exposed the credit card and personal data of more than 110 million customers, appears to have started with a malware-laced email sent to employees at a firm that did business with Target. Anyone operating a data center—or anyone just connecting to the Internet–needs to make fighting spam and malware a top priority. Everyone who goes online must have the tools to fight phishing and social engineering.
Let’s talk about email. How do you convey the importance of email protection in today’s culture?
Steven : Email is still an important business tool. It’s also the favourite method of entry for attackers. No news there. As a gateway to sensitive customer information, crucial databases, and other valuable data, email remains one of the most effective threat vectors around.
Email is older than the web, which may mean that it’s lost some of its lustre. Many see social media platforms as more exciting, and the fact that email is non-proprietary means no one is pushing its agenda. But email is actually growing in influence; as the number of internet users grow, so does email usage. Every social media account requires an email address, and most people have more than one.
Email security solutions need to continue to evolve to keep up with the increasingly sophisticated attacks that threaten all of us. At SpamTitan, we do our best to educate the IT community and potential customers on the consequences of doing nothing. Putting the right protection in place is key. Prevention is cheaper and easier than dealing with the damage and financial loss resulting from a successful hacking attack.
What should MSPs be doing today to protect themselves from email threats?
Steven: MSPs often provide email security as a service. One customer getting hacked can result in the IP address for many customers getting hacked – a single bot on the network can bring down the service for multiple customers. Preventing IP blacklisting in the first place is critical; MSPs need to ensure the anti-spam solution they deploy has features such as IP rotation, bandwidth throttling, and rate controls, allowing limits to be set for emails sent per unit time, size, domain and per mailbox. If a potential blacklisting event is detected, the solution also needs to alert the network administrators so action can be taken. MSP IP addresses can be very well protected by using specific features within SpamTitan like Rate Controls and IP Delivery Pool features.
MSPs see their margins squeezed by commoditisation of services by technology giants. They need more cost effective infrastructure and technology at the same time as they’re being pressured to continuously improve customer service. MSP margins, which directly affect profits, are being squeezed by the economy, competition, and the need to keep up with technology. MSPs customer vary and some like more control of the service provided than others. With SpamTitan MSPs can delegate administration of domain groups and/or domains to their customers, this provides some control to the customer and also frees up the MSPs time to deal with other issues.
Attackers still rely on email as a method for deploying malware, whether via advanced phishing attacks, drive by downloads – the list of threat delivery methods is increasing all the time. There is no single cure for these persistent and increasing threats. Powerful email security (inbound and outbound filtering) provides a barrier for attackers to overcome. SpamTitan includes the latest version of the Kaspersky anti-virus software which offers zero-day threat detection via Cloud based signatures. MSPs need to deliver consistent protection. A heavily layered security solution like SpamTitan successfully delivers this integrated approach.
What kind of MSPs use SpamTitan?
Steven : MSPs looking to offer their customers world-class email security without the requirement of sophisticated infrastructure, expensive expertise, or massive time investment for what should ideally be an invisible service. Because spam filtering is considered to be an integral part of an email service MSPs, customers aren’t willing to pay extra for it.
The MSP customers who use SpamTitan are knowledgeable and know what they want in a solution. Many are moving from cumbersome and overly complex products. They know what they need to find in an alternative that really works for them.
What’s the most common feedback you get from MSP customers?
Steven : How easy SpamTitan is to set up and the fact that once deployed there are no reports of customers being hit by spam or email viruses. It’s not surprising that our solution is so successful; it uses multiple layers of testing and filtering and comes with double anti-virus protection.
Our MSP appreciate the fact that SpamTitan is easy to use, easy to manage, and extremely affordable compared to other solutions they’ve tested. A major reason why MSPs invite SpamTitan into their product portfolio is the attractive pricing. With MSP margins shrinking MSPs are very careful about planning their technology to give them the edge in the market and to provide reasonable returns, and they find they can depend on SpamTitan to deliver.
If you would like to find out more about SpamTitan and how it can help you offer a more secure and profitable service we would be delighted to hear form you. You can email us at info@spamtitan.com or call +1 813 304 2544 (US) or +353 91 545555 (IRL).
by TitanHQ News | Mar 31, 2015 | Spam News
Irish security firms were noticeably lacking from the latest Cybersecurity 500, a recently setcyber security, network security up global listing of the “hottest” firms in the cybersecurity sector. So far, only two companies come from Ireland; email and web security vendor SpamTitan Technologies headquartered in Galway and VigiTrust in Dublin.
Launched last October by a Californian Research company. The firm behind the Cybersecurity 500 explains that the intention was to create a list of firms worth watching rather than simply reflecting size and revenue. The list is based on the recommendations of a range of experts including CISOs, VCs, security professionals encountered at global security events and during research. The company explain that none of the companies listed paid anything simply to be included.
by TitanHQ News | Jan 1, 2015 | Spam News
Data breaches and cyberattacks are scary and not just for consumers but also for IT professionals and small business owners. It’s hard to really grasp the level of fear that these attacks generate. Successful cyberattacks cost businesses a lot of money by scaring away investors and customers not to mention the expensive damage that can be done to an organizations computer network. The average cost of cyber crime attacks per organisation in the United States is estimated at 12.69 million U.S. dollars. Second-ranked is Germany averaging 8.13 million U.S. dollars in damages per company attack.
Here’s a discouragingly long list of some of the biggest retail cyber attacks of the past year.
Sony. One of the most recent hacks, the Sony break-in compromised 47,000 social security numbers, sometimes with accompanying names, birth dates, and addresses.
Neiman Marcus. One of the first announced hacks of the year, the Neiman Marcus attack actually took place in 2013. The data breach set off alerts in the company’s security system 60,000 times. The data of 350,000 customers was compromised.
Sally Beauty. Slightly better than the Neiman Marcus breach. Only—only!—280,000 unlucky customers had their data compromised.
White Lodging. White Lodging is a hotel management company that manages franchises for hotels such as the Hilton, Marriott, and Sheraton. In February it was announced that there had been a data breach in the restaurants and gift shops in 14 of the managed hotels.
Michaels. The craft supply store announced in January that the credit card information of 2.6 million customers had possibly been exposed in a breach that lasted eight months. Not only that: in its subsidiary Aaron Brothers stores, another 400,000 cards may have been compromised.
Affinity Gaming. The company, which manages casinos, announced that they found evidence in May that their credit card system had been hacked.
Bebe Stores. The women’s clothing chain confirmed in December that there had been a data breach in November in their 175 retail stores.
Staples. Staples announced in December that it had suffered a data breach occurring over a period of six months that compromised 1.16 million credit and debit cards. The data breach was discovered because the stolen card information was being used for fraudulent purchases.
Albertsons. Cyber thieves hacked into a series of stores under the Albertsons’ umbrella, including SuperValu, Acme, Shaw’s Supermarket, Hornbacher’s, Star Market, Cub Foods, Farm Fresh, Shop ‘N Save, and Shoppers Food & Pharmacy.
PF Changs. In June, the restaurant chain announced that a security breach had occurred that affected the information of its customers at 33 restaurants.
UPS. UPS announced in August that credit card information might have been compromised at 51 UPS stores.
Dairy Queen. The Dairy Queen breach may have affected 600,000 unfortunate ice cream lovers.
Goodwill. The Goodwill breach compromised 868,000 debit and credit cards.
Home Depot. This was one of the hugest breaches of the year, with a mind-boggling 56 million debit and credit cards affected.
Sourcebooks. Sourcebooks is an online bookseller. Its online system was hacked last spring, with data from just over 5,000 customers being stolen.
Kmart. Kmart revealed in October that a data breach had taken place in its system.
Staples. The Staples breach may have compromised the credit and debit card information of 1.16 million customers.
Domino’s Pizza. The pizza chain had the information of 650,000 customers in Belgium and France stolen and held for ransom by the hacking group Rex Mundi.
EBay. Hackers absconded with name, address, phone number, and birth date information on 145 million accounts.
Jimmy John’s. The sandwich chain announced in September that credit and debit card information had been compromised at 216 outlets.
Spec’s. This Texas wine chain suffered a 17-month breach that compromised the information of perhaps 550,000 customers.
Whew, pretty bad, so perhaps it’s not surprising the Secret Service estimated that 1,000 American merchants were affected by attacks like this during the summer of 2014 and that many of them didn’t even know it. It’s war out there, and according to the Ponemon Institute, only one-third of computer security experts say they do continuous database monitoring. Twenty-two percent say they don’t monitor at all, which makes winning the war a challenge.
Although many organizations are still lacking confidence in their ability to prevent a cyber attack or data breach there are many highly-developed and proven security tools available that provide a vital layer of protection from security threats to help IT Pros secure their organizations.
by TitanHQ News | 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 TitanHQ News | Feb 19, 2014 | Spam News
Tampa, FL and Galway, Ireland – 19th Feb 2014. The weather is almost too warm in Sochi for the Olympics. One needs adequate packed powder snow to ski, or at least to ski safely—instead, in Sochi, they have ice, plus clouds. Clouds make it difficult to see where you are going: when the sky and the ground are the same colour, you cannot distinguish heaven from earth. It is easy to get disoriented and suffer the sensation of not knowing whether you are skiing across the snow or floating above it.
But in Moscow, there is plenty of snow. There at Kaspersky (which is one of the anti virus solutions included with SpamTitan anti spam), security researchers and antivirus software developers are hunkered down in the double-paned-windowed-warmth of a Moscow winter, working long hours to find, expose, and the contain computer viruses.
What they found this week was Careto. This virus was lurking in the same place as a related virus found a few years ago. Kaspersky published a detailed forensic report to explain what they found. Some of this forensics you could have done yourself; other is much more complex. For example, they use the Linux program “strings” to extract text from the executable file. There they found comments and instructions that the programmer had written in Spanish, plus the name of the virus itself: Careto.
Servers used by attackers revealed 380+ victims from 31 countries.
Kaspersky says this Spanish word means “ugly face” or “mask”. According to Kaspersky ‘What makes The Mask special is the complexity of the toolset used by the attackers. This includes an extremely sophisticated malware, a rootkit, a bootkit, Mac OS X and Linux versions and possibly versions for Android and iOS (iPad/iPhone)’. It’s believed that some foreign government paid to develop the virus, because it works on so many systems, suggesting a large team and much effort. Data found by investigating and monitoring a set of command-and-control (C&C) servers used by the attackers revealed more than 380 unique victims from 31 countries. The main targets were government organisations including embassies, energy, oil and gas companies, research institutions, and activist’s and private equity firms.
Careto spreads using phishing. If you clicked on a mail containing their malicious link, you would have been sent to mock-up copies of El Pais, The Washington Post, El Especatdor, El Mundo, and Publico newpapers. The actual link is hidden. It says, for example: elpais.linkconf(dot)net. Careto infected some computers by exploiting a weakness in the 2012 version of Adobe Flash (Flash is used to display video in certain web pages.). The other attack was made by hiding an executable program in an otherwise harmless .jpeg picture file. The names are: dinner.jpg, waiter.jpg, and chef.jpg.
For victims a Catero malware infection spells disaster.
The virus intercepts all communication channels and collects information from the victim’s machine. Once installed, the virus steals encryption keys, records Skype calls, transcribes what you type, and listens in on data coming to and from your device. It then sends these stolen passwords, email addresses, and bank account numbers, and other secrets to a set of command and control servers, controlled by the hackers. One of these was found running inside a SoftLayer data centre, a cloud-service provider.
Detection is difficult because of stealth rootkit capabilities, built-in functionalities and additional cyber-espionage modules. Having made their discovery, Kaspersky was able to follow the virus’s forensic clues to show what computers were affected and provide lots of details about where the virus came from. Kaspersky Lab’s products detects and removes all known versions of The Mask/Careto malware so you are safe from Careto when using SpamTitan anti spam.
