Highlighed Technologies: McAfee Email Defense Service

Introduction

The Women's Fund of Western Massachusetts, an Easthampton-based non-profit agency, advances social change philanthropy to create economic and social equality for women and girls in Western Massachusetts through grant making, strategic advocacy, and community collaborations. In the fall of 2009, the Women's Fund reported a huge volume of SPAM and desparately wanted to regain control of their inboxes.

Assessment

The Women's Fund currently had an on-premise, server-based anti-spam solution installed, but it required frequent maintenance and had become less and less effective. Therefore, IBS discussed "cloud-based", "Software-as-a-Service" (SaaS) solutions available.

Solution

IBS proposed McAfee (formerly MX Logic) Email Defense Service. The Email Defense Service is a comprehensive email security solution that can protect your entire network to safeguard your communication and information integrity. The fully-managed Email Defense service is a perimeter-based solution that blocks over 99 percent of spam, viruses, worms and harmful content and attachments - and helps to eliminate 90 percent of spam-related costs.

Because the Email Defense Service sits outside the network, it is an ideal first line of defense that rapidly identifies and denies all known spammer IP addresses so they never even make it to your on-premises infrastructure. Over-tapped mail servers and internet connections will immediately be relieved of CPU and memory usage and bandwidth usage spikes and become more effective.

After redirecting the Women’s Fund’s mail exchange (MX) record to the service, all inbound messages are compared against an extensive Threat database of known spammer IP addresses. This Threat database is compiled and continually updated by the service's Threat Center, based on a 24x7 analysis of worldwide email traffic and third-party real-time black hole lists (RBLs). Messages are also filtered with their proprietary worm and virus detection engine, which rapidly identifies and intercepts zero-hour mass mailing worms and viruses before they can enter a corporate network.

If a message includes a sending IP address found in the Threat Database or is found to contain a virus or worm, delivery will be denied and the connection will be immediately dropped prior to the message entering the customer's network. With such filtering, SPAM is quarantined without ever entering the Women's Fund network and notifies the end users via a daily report as to the items that were quarantined.

The service is available on a subscription basis and the Women's Fund now pays a low monthly recurring fee for the service. They've benefited from a significant decrease in SPAM since implementation, increasing efficiencies and decreasing email-related headaches.