Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall Protects Against Data Leaks

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An interesting new improvement to the already-great Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall

Barracuda Networks announced that the Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall Protects Against Data Leaks with Broader Outbound Email Content Filtering Capabilities.

Barracuda Spam Firewall 800

These exciting new features to its flagship Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall enhance full inbound and outbound email scanning from the same appliance.

The new features extend the capabilities beyond spam and virus scanning for outbound email, which can safeguard an organization’s email reputation, and include broader content inspection based on policy for both inbound and outbound email on a single appliance. These enhancements ensure that confidential or sensitive information is not distributed outside the organization.

More from Barracuda Networks

“It is crucial for organizations, especially within highly regulated industries, to have the ability to protect intellectual property and other sensitive information from being distributed,” said Stephen Pao, vice president of product management for Barracuda Networks. “The new Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall extends our powerful content scanning features and makes it easier for customers to manage both inbound and outbound email filtering from the same appliance.”

Enforce Corporate Policies through Outbound Email Scanning

The new Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall allows administrators to define policies to prevent confidential or sensitive information from leaving the organization. For example, hospitals and other healthcare organizations that must comply with HIPAA policies that mandate the confidentiality of sensitive patient information such as social security or credit card numbers as well as personal health information can now apply pre-defined dictionaries to outbound email scanning to ensure compliance. In addition, administrators can set up separate rules for inbound and outbound filtering, and review the outbound email quarantine for any policy violations before delivery.

Enterprise-Ready Management

Additionally, the Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall now offers increased granularity of its roles-based administration interface, enabling assignment of sender and recipient policies on a per-domain basis. These administration enhancements are useful for larger organizations that delegate administration across different divisions and for service providers offering granular policy controls directly to their end customers.

Pricing and Availability

The Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall firmware release 4.1 is immediately available in eight models with prices ranging from $699 to $89,999. International pricing and availability varies based on region.

For more information please visit www.barracudanetworks.ca.

About the Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall

The Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall is available in eight models with no per user fees. A single Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall supports up to 100,000 active users, and multiple units can be clustered together for even greater capacity and availability. Its architecture leverages 12 defense layers: denial of service and security protection, rate control, IP analysis, sender authentication, recipient verification, virus protection, policy (user-specified rules), Fingerprint Analysis, Intent Analysis, Image Analysis, Bayesian Analysis, and a Spam Rules Scoring engine.

In addition, the entire Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall line features simultaneous inbound and outbound email filtering with the inclusion of sophisticated outbound email filtering techniques, such as rate controls, domain restrictions, user authentication (SASL), keyword and attachment blocking, triple-layer virus blocking, and remote user support for outbound email filtering. The Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall’s layered approach minimizes the processing of each email, which yields the performance required to process millions of messages per day.

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Fraudsters limber up for World Cup themed scams

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An interesting article from The Register, on the upcoming FIFA World Cup, and how we can expect a whole variety of scams themed on the event.

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Fraudsters as well as footballers are gearing up for this month’s World Cup extravaganza in South Africa.

Football governing body FIFA has already warned [1] supporters to be wary over various forms of scams that are likely to crop up in the run-up to the start of the tournament, which kicks off in ten days.

FIFA lottery, prize draw or competition scams are likely to abound. All represent types of advanced fee fraud where fraudsters attempt to trick people into paying "administrative fees" supposedly needed to secure non-existent World Cup tickets or cash prizes.

"Prize draws and competitions offering tickets to the 2010 FIFA World Cup can only be held by companies who are commercially affiliated with FIFA, such as, for example, sponsors," it said.

FIFA also used the notice to issue a warning against ticket touts and unauthorised agents, a more standard message that has preceded every recent World Cup.

Spam emails touting 419-lite lottery scams themed around the World Cup are already in circulation (as recorded by Trend Micro here and
here). More can be expected to follow as excitement builds toward the start of the tournament next month.

Security watchers report that scam emails seen thus far have not been sent through botnet networks of compromised PCs but via direct spamming from known Nigeria-based 419 scam-friendly IP addresses.

Search engine manipulation, themed around events at the World Cup and designed to divert users searching for video clips and news towards scareware portals, is also likely to crop up, among other types of malware attack, especially once the tournament kicks off.

MessageLabs, Symantec’s hosted security division, has already begun intercepting World Cup-themed email-borne malware attacks. Infected email blocked by MessageLabs were sent from an IP address in Macau, China, and composed in Portuguese (targeting fans of Brazil and Portugal). The infected messages posed as emails from one of the event’s soft drink sponsors.

Football fans receiving the email were encouraged to download a hacking tool that posed as a football-themed application.

“Once downloaded and activated, the malware produces files that generate pop-up messages and in the background collects information on what other machines are on the same network, enabling the attacker further access to the compromised networks,” explained Paul Wood, MessageLabs Intelligence senior analyst.

Symantec has set up a dedicated website that aims to track and warn football fans about net threats connected with the World Cup, as they arise. 2010NetThreat will also feature security advice, competitions and news on the tournament itself. ®

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The original article is on The Register

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Surfing Porn Still Popular at Work

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**excerpt from Globe & Mail Article. Original can be found here.

Barracuda Web Filter

Marco Bonanni of Optrics Engineering, a diamond partner of Barracuda Networks, which specializes in e-mail and web security, said workers should be aware everything they’re doing is marked and logged — even things they might think are innocent.

“The equipment that most organizations install nowadays have months and months of logged data and information about every single message that goes in and out of the company, or every single URL or website that’s been visited” he said from Edmonton.

What’s more, some filters are set or configured to display a message notifying users that a particular website they’re trying to visit has been blocked.

“Even though it is blocked, it still logs the fact that they attempted to go to it” he said.

In most cases, Bonanni said companies are trying to protect themselves against virus infection, but in some instances they’re looking for something specifically to prevent abuse.

**excerpt from Globe & Mail Article. Original can be found here.

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The dangers of weak passwords on Social sites (Facebook / Linkedin)

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Posted on by admin in Barracuda Web Filter |Fortinet |Web Filter

– Phishers Used Facebook to Penetrate Financial Firm’s Computer System (March 4, 2010)

Phishers used Facebook to burrow their way into the network of a large US financial company last year.

The attackers took control of one employee’s Facebook account and using information culled from that individual’s friends’ profiles, sent what appeared to be personal messages to several other company employees about pictures taken at a company picnic.

The phishers learned of the picnic through postings on the hijacked account.  When one of the other employees received a message asking her to click on a link that would allow her to view the pictures, her computer became infected with keystroke logging malware.

When that employee logged in to a VPN account to access the company network, the attackers were able to capture the necessary information to gain access to that network.  The intruders managed to get deeper into the network and take control of two servers before they were detected.

Original Story: http://lastwatchdog.com/facebook-phishers-breached-corporate-network/

Use a different hard password for each publicly accessible website service you use and be suspicious of links in e-mail even if they appear to be from friends.

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Barracuda Load Balancer Firmware Release 3.1

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Barracuda Networks has announced that the Load Balancer now includes Layer 7 Content Routing and Global Server Load Balancing.  Details from their press release:

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Campbell, Calif., Feb. 4, 2010 – Barracuda Networks Inc. today announced new features for the Barracuda Load Balancer, including Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) and Layer 7 content routing.  Available on Barracuda Load Balancer models 440 and 640, GSLB utilizes a built-in geographical IP database that ensures traffic redirection to the next available data center in the event of outage or other performance hindering event at the primary data center.

Layer 7 content routing enables administrators to direct Web traffic to different server groups based on the content of the incoming request.  Content rules can be based on any part of the incoming traffic such HTTP headers, URLs and parameters.  The application modules can be deployed on multiple servers and using content rules the Barracuda Load Balancer will retrieve the correct content based on the URL path, sub domain or application parameters.  Layer 7 content routing is available in Barracuda Load Balancer models 340 and above.

“Unlike competing solutions, new content routing capabilities are powered by a comprehensive rules engine enabling administrators to deploy large applications across multiple servers,” said Stephen Pao, vice president of product management for Barracuda Networks.  “The Barracuda Load Balancer continues to offer exceptional ease-of-use for an enterprise-class application delivery solution at an affordable price.” 

Barracuda Load Balancer firmware 3.1 adds support for 802.1Q-based virtual LAN (VLAN) tagging for advanced deployments.  Utilizing this capability, the Barracuda Load Balancer can distribute traffic between servers that are deployed in different VLAN subgroups, enabling administrators to segment their backend server networks by application or user group.  The Barracuda Load Balancer also introduces support for one-armed proxy deployments, allowing administrators to determine exactly what network traffic to route through the Barracuda Load Balancer.

In addition, traffic acceleration technologies such as Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) multiplexing have been incorporated to improve application response times.  TCP multiplexing allows the Barracuda

Load Balancer to reuse existing network connections and removes the overhead associated with creating or terminating connections.  This connection pooling enables administrators to achieve greater efficiency among servers and faster performing applications.

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If you like, you can view the original press release

Pricing and Availability
The new Barracuda Load Balancer firmware 3.1 is immediately available to current and future Barracuda Load Balancer customers.  The Barracuda Load Balancer comes in four models ranging in price from $1,499 to $8,999 depending on the model with no per port charges or per server licensing fees.

If you would like more information on the Barracuda Load Balancer, please visit BarracudaNetworks.ca

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Network Instrument’s “State of the Network Global Study”

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Even though there has been a huge adoption of virtual environments, the recent Network Instruments "State of the Network Global Study" came out,and shows that three quarters of networks lack the appropriate tools, and visibility.

Here is the original press release on the study.

Key Statistics

Virtualization

  • 75% of respondents have implemented virtualization
  • 75% lacked adequate tools, visibility, or information to troubleshoot problems Economic Impact
  • 73% were being asked to do more with fewer resources
  • 65% of IT staffs had not experienced layoffs Performance Troubleshooting
  • 80% cited identifying the problem source as their primary troubleshooting concern
  • 40% identified ensuring application performance as their biggest challenge Unified Communications
  • 60% will have implemented video by 2010
  • 57% will have implemented unified messaging systems by 2010

With the economy impacting every facet of society, it wasn’t surprising that the network is not immune from its effect. The need to reduce costs not only means IT staffs are managing leaner and meaner networks, it also generated higher than expected adoption rates for technologies like virtualization and unified communications. In querying nearly 450 network professionals, it was clear that cost savings will be the primary driver for technology adoption over the next two years.

If you’re interested in learning more about the study, you can download the pdf here.

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Simple Cost-Effective Web Acceleration with WEBaXcel

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Posted on by admin in Uncategorized |WEBaXcel |Web Acceleration

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WEBaXcel Appliance

The new WEBaXcel Appliance is an advanced web acceleration product designed to optimize the performance of your web-based applications and downloads. The WEBaXcel accelerates web connectivity across one or more Internet links (two or more broadband links are recommended for best performance).

It will dramatically speed up web sessions and downloads and can work with either a single Internet connection, or up to three connections – although multiple connections are recommended.

Reliability

How crticial is Internet access to your business?  The WEBaXcel appliance ensures that all connectivity out to the Internet stays up and running 24/7 by automatically failing over to a secondary inexpensive broadband link.

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Network Instruments Virtual Monitoring

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As people expand the number of applications running in virtual environments, they need to look at visibility whether they can monitor and analyze virtual traffic for ensuring performance or security.

Most companies handle this by placing appliances on the physical network and tracking VM communications when they hit the physical network. This however ignores communications that stay within the virtual host.

If you have multiple VMs within the same virtual host communicating with each other, you’d need to place a software analyzer or probe within the virtual host to monitor the internal communications.

This is a good solution, but it ignores the realities that people want to extend the power of their existing analysis devices into virtual environments. In Network Instrument’s case, people have come to rely on retrospective network analysis in their GigaStor to troubleshoot sporadic problems. GigaStor is like a TiVo for your network capturing terabytes of packets for later playback and analysis. So, rather than being notified of a problem by the user and starting a packet capture, you’re always recording network activities and can simply rewind the network and troubleshoot. Because of the need for hardware, this solution can never be virtualized. So, that’s where the Virtual TAP comes in to complete the virtualized offering. The Virtual TAP copies all communications between VMs on the virtual host and pushes them out to the GigaStor.

So, with this Network Instruments solution you’re able to monitor performance in both virtual and physical environments. You can monitor application and network performance from a single integrated console interface using Observer or enterprise-wide using the Observer Reporting Server. One benefit that we haven’t covered with the Virtual TAP is that you can also push the internal communications out to any other hardware or software product needing access to the virtual environment. Network Instruments is also the first in the performance analysis space to offer this.

Some External Resources

Networking World (March 25) – Product of the Week

http://www.networkworld.com/slideshows/2009/033009-products-of-the-week.html#slide9

Enterprise Systems (March 23) – Network Instruments’ Observer Combines Physical, Virtual Visibility

http://esj.com/articles/2009/03/23/network-instruments-observer-combines-physical-virtual-visibility.aspx

Network World (March 25) – Outing blind spots in the virtual realm

http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/nsm/2009/032309nsm2.html?hpg1=bn

Virtual Strategy Magazine (March 23) – Network Instruments Closes the Gap (PODCAST)

http://www.virtual-strategy.com/VSM-Podcasts/Network-Instruments-Closes-the-Gap.html

Network World (March 23) – Why Network Managers should care about VMs

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/40013

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The FortiOS 4.0 innovation milestone – by Michael Xie

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Michael Xie

Michael Xie

The FortiOS 4.0 innovation milestone

This portion of a post by Michael Xie, co founder of Fortinet celebrates their new FortiOS 4.0.

Original Post at: http://blog.fortinet.com/the-fortios-40-innovation-milestone/

Today was another big milestone in the history of the company I co-founded and I’m very happy to have this opportunity to tell you about it. Fortinet has released FortiOS 4.0, the firmware upgrade for our FortiGate security systems. This release is the result of a tremendous effort by our development teams over the better part of 12+ months. These highly skilled and talented teams worked hard to design and implement these technology innovations so that we could confidently put the product in front of our customers.

Even in this time of economic uncertainty, I believe that innovation is our greatest strength. While other security vendors are merely coasting along, Fortinet is focused more than ever on expanding our vision for comprehensive and easily managed network security solutions. We are continuously updating our FortiOS firmware and each release builds upon our existing, pioneering innovations. For example, with FortiOS 3.0, Fortinet became the first security hardware company to offer VoIP / IM / P2P security; we were also the first security vendor to deliver integrated SSL VPN with complete content inspection. We’ve now built upon that technology to offer full application control and prioritization of more than 1,000 apps. Overall, our FortiOS 4.0 release delivers on two main objectives:

  1. Give our FortiGate customers access to security technologies and features that were previously only available via a combination of standalone vendors
  2. Continue to drive the increased security capabilities that help protect our customers from the never-ending and evolving threat landscape

FortiOS 4.0 introduces several features, the four most significant of which I want to highlight here:

  • Application Control
  • Data Leakage Prevention
  • WAN Optimization
  • SSL Inspection

more…

Product Links: FortiGate Firewalls

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Network Instrument’s “Destination: Performance” Tour

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Network Instruments has announced their “Destination Performance” tour. Here’s their announcement:

Destination: Performance

Network Instruments’ game-changing approach to network monitoring, troubleshooting, and analysis is so solid you’ve got to see it for yourself.

Avoid the roadside breakdowns that leave businesses and their clients stranded. From company-wide reports to deep packet analysis, we’ll show you the smooth road to an efficient network and a healthy business.

Join us for lunch and tips from the experts.

We’ll discuss:

  • Application performance monitoring
  • VoIP and UC analysis
  • Device and route monitoring
  • Back-in-time troubleshooting
  • Enterprise-wide reporting

Plus, get a first look at our newly released Observer 13 analysis solution.

The Destination: Performance tour is scheduled to stop in the following cities:

  • Minneapolis, MN – February 12, 2009
  • Dallas, TX – March 3, 2009
  • Chicago, IL – March 4, 2009
  • Toronto, ON – March 5, 2009
  • Boston, MA – March 10, 2009
  • Philadelphia, PA – March 11, 2009
  • Atlanta, GA – March 12, 2009
  • Phoenix, AZ – March 24, 2009
  • San Francisco, CA – March 25, 2009
  • Seattle, WA – March 26, 2009

Questions?   Contact Will McClain

About Network Instruments

Network Instruments, a leading provider of innovative analysis solutions, helps organizations and enterprises ensure the delivery of business-critical applications on their networks. The company’s monitoring and reporting products provide comprehensive visibility into networks and applications to optimize network performance, speed troubleshooting, and assist long-term capacity planning. Network Instruments solutions provide integrated enterprise-wide reporting and back-in-time investigation capabilities for troubleshooting networks. The company is headquartered in Minneapolis with sales offices worldwide and distributors in over 50 countries.

To see Network Instruments products, visit http://www.packetsniffers.com, operated by Optrics Engineering, a Network Instruments partner.

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