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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Posted on by admin in Spam Firewall |Web Filter |Web Site Firewall

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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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Barracuda Spam Firewall Rejects Invalid Non-Delivery Report Messages

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Barracuda Networks Inc., the worldwide leader in email and Web security appliances, recently announced a new feature in the Barracuda Spam Firewall that can differentiate legitimate Non-Delivery Report (NDR) messages – also known as bounce messages – from invalid NDR messages resulting from spoofing attacks. Using [tag]Invalid Bounce Suppression[/tag], the [tag]Barracuda Spam Firewall[/tag] prevents “backscatter” messages from reaching innocent email senders.

“Backscatter is an unfortunate side effect of the continued prevalence of email spoofing by spam campaigns that is now plaguing corporate email servers,” said Stephen Pao, vice president of product management for Barracuda Networks.  “It is also a frustrating, and sometimes confusing, problem for email users who are the innocent victims.”

Backscatter occurs when spammers, hackers or other users with malicious intent, spoof the email addresses of legitimate email users to send spam, viruses or worms.  The receiving email server typically rejects the email and sends an NDR message to the spoofed email address. As a result, the legitimate email user receives a bounce message for emails that they never sent.

“While one common technique to minimize the impact of backscatter is to simply define policies to block all incoming bounce messages, doing so can result in the blocking of legitimate bounce messages,” said Pao.  “As such, distinguishing legitimate from invalid bounce messages can be extremely important to users who send business-critical email.”

Invalid Bounce Suppression tags the sender addresses of all outgoing messages sent from the Barracuda Spam Firewall’s outbound relay, or through the Barracuda Spam Firewall-Outbound appliance.  The tags are encoded with built-in expiration periods and encrypted to prevent forgery.  When an NDR message is received by the Barracuda Spam Firewall, a valid tag must be present in the bounce recipient address (i.e., the original sender address) for the bounce message to be delivered.  If the bounce recipient address does not contain a tag or if a tag is invalid, the NDR message is rejected.  Usage of the Invalid Bounce Suppression feature is transparent to legitimate senders and recipients.

“Beyond the reputation benefits of preventing spam and viruses from leaving an organization’s network, Invalid Bounce Suppression has a direct impact on reducing the amount of unwanted email that hits users’ email inboxes,” added Pao.  “Invalid Bounce Suppression provides another compelling reason why organizations should also consider relaying their outbound email through an email security solution, such as the Barracuda Spam Firewall or Barracuda Spam Firewall-Outbound.”

In addition to Invalid Bounce Suppression, the latest Barracuda Spam Firewall version also includes additional rules governing email policy, including new policy rules for character sets used in emails and attachments, reverse DNS resolutions of sending email servers, and full URLs (including query strings) embedded in emails.

Pricing and Availability:

The latest features, including Invalid Bounce Suppression, are available with Barracuda Spam Firewall firmware release 3.5.12 and above.  The Barracuda Spam Firewall is available in eight models with prices starting at $899.  International pricing and availability varies based on region.

About the Barracuda Spam Firewall:

The Barracuda Spam Firewall is available in eight models and supports up to 100,000 active users with no per user licensing fees.  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 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 Firewall’s layered approach minimizes the processing of each email, which yields the performance required to process millions of messages per day. 

For more information on the Barracuda Spam Firewall, visit http://www.BarracudaNetworks.ca/spam-firewall.aspx.

Popularity: 39% [?]

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Barracuda Networks Tech Alert

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Posted on by admin in Barracuda Networks |Spam Firewall

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This just in from Barracuda Networks regarding the latest firmware upgrade for their Spam Firewall …

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Technical Alert No. 20080722
Description: Configuration changes to all Barracuda Spam Firewalls upon upgrade to Firmware Release 3.5.12
Revision: A1.0
Affected Barracuda Networks Products: Barracuda Spam Firewall Release 3.5.12

Details: On July 14, 2008, Barracuda Networks released Barracuda Spam Firewall Release 3.5.12.001 into beta release. Upon upgrading to firmware release 3.5.12, three one-time configuration changes will be made to your Barracuda Spam Firewall:

  1. Disabling of bounce messages. On the Basic -> Spam Scoring page, in the Spam Bounce (NDR) Configuration section, the Send Bounce field will be set to No. Because of the growing number of spam emails spoofing addresses of good email senders, this change is being made to avoid sending bounce messages to innocent parties.
  2. Removal of Spamhaus external block lists previously listed as “Common External Blacklists.” On the Block/Accept -> IP Reputation page, the following Spamhaus external block lists will be removed from the Custom External RBLs list: sbl.spamhaus.org, xbl.spamhaus.org and sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org.The Barracuda Spam Firewall used to enable Spamhaus external block lists by default when usage of those lists was free to all Internet users. Now that Spamhaus is seeking license fees from some Internet users, this change is being made to remove the previous default settings and to ensure that Barracuda Spam Firewall customers do not experience problems or unexpected service interruptions.
  3. Replacement of removed Spamhaus external block lists with Barracuda Reputation. If any Spamhaus external block lists were removed by the previous action and the Barracuda IP Reputation field was set to Off, the Barracuda IP Reputation will be set to the most restrictive action of all of the removed Spamhaus external block lists.For example, if sbl.spamhaus.org was set to Block and Barracuda IP Reputation was set to Off, the upgrade would remove sbl.spamhaus.org from the Custom External RBLs list and set Barracuda IP Reputation to Block.The purpose of this change is to maintain or improve performance of the Barracuda Spam Firewall. Barracuda Networks strongly recommends blocking based on Barracuda IP Reputation, and this blocking is particularly important when external block lists such as Spamhaus are not in use.

These changes will be made only once. If you want to re-enable bounce messages and reinsert the affected Spamhaus external block lists, you may do so manually after the upgrade.

Barracuda Networks recommends that you create a new backup of your configuration after upgrading to firmware release 3.5.12.

Risk Rating: None

For More Tech Alerts: www.BarracudaNetworks.com/ns/support/tech_alert.php

For more information on Barracuda Spam Firewall’s please go to: http://www.BarracudaNetworks.ca

Popularity: 20% [?]

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