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Review of GFiMailSecurity 10 for Exchange/SMTP

Raj — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 17:37:30 +0000

Every organization that has a website and uses Internet for its business, be it small, medium sized or very large, depends on a mail server to send and receive emails. Many companies use Microsoft Exchange server for its features and enormous flexibility. Since every employee has an email account and they use it for doing their day-to-day job, it becomes imperative that the mail server is always available and functional, on a 24×7 basis. One of the critical ingredients of the availability management of the mail server is that it must be kept free of any virus, trojans and malware related incidents. Ensuring this also helps in keeping your network free of viruses since majority of viruses that gets downloaded to a network come through emails that are virus infected. This happens with every organization at least once a year and the consequences are devastating.

GFiMailSecurity 10 is an anti-virus solution for Exchange/SMTP servers. This is the only such anti virus solution that has multiple anti-virus engines that guarantees protection against virus, trojans and malwares. Since two brains are better than one, having multiple anti-virus engines increases the chances of detecting and cleaning a virus from email by several folds. The underlying concept of GFiMailSecurity 10 for Exchange/SMTP servers for using multiple virus engines is that even if one vendor is fast enough to react to a virus outbreak and release a virus definition update before its competitors does, GFiMailSecurity 10 can still detect and clean the new viruses by using the latest virus definition updates from any of the virus engines that it uses. Norman Virus Control & BitDefender virus engines are included along with this product. The optional virus engines are from Kaspersky, McAfee and AVG.

GFiMailSecurity 10 also comes with a Trojan & Executable Scanner that puts this overall solution much ahead than its competitors. Since a virus can be detected and cleaned only when a signature file that can detect a virus is available, you still need some other mechanism to take care of email attachments that contain some sort of trojan. GFiMailSecurity doesn’t rely on virus definition files for detecting trojans that are in the form of executables hidden inside a compressed file or email attachments. It uses its patented technology to dis-assemble the executable file and tries to determine what the file intends to do and when it matches its actions against a database of known malicious actions, the attachment is taken care of.

That’s not all of GFiMailSecurity 10. It also has an Email Exploit engine and a HTML threat engine. While the email exploit engine takes care of operating system level exploits that can be performed by an infected email, the HTML threat engine on the other hand scans the email that are received in HTML format for any malicious scripts or code.

Overall the GFiMailSecurity 10 for Exchange/SMTP servers is an email anti-virus solution that is much better and ahead than the other similar products in the market by combining multiple virus engines, trojan & executable scanner, Email exploit scanner and a HTML threat engine into one product. That’s what companies need, one product that can take care of their complete end-to-end requirement. I highly recommend that you give this product a try, and also, another product from GFi called GFI MailEssentials that offers a fast set-up and a high spam detection rate would complement GFiMailSecurity 10.

Disclaimer: This is a paid review that does not require me to provide a positive feedback and does not contain affiliate links. The review has not been edited by the product owner and is written by me. If you wish to order a review, you may do so here.

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How Good are You at Internet Security?

Raj — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 15:33:38 +0000

You could be an expert user or a newbie when it comes to using a computer to access websites on Internet, but did you know that every computer that’s connected to Internet is prone to attacks by hackers. Now why would a hacker be interested in your hacking your computer? The answer is quite obvious. At the time of attacking a computer, one of the primary intentions of a hacker is to gain access to your computer’s data by means of exploiting various security holes that are available on your computer in the form of poorly written applications or the security holes contained in the operating system itself. This data could be holding your sensitive information such as credit card numbers that you punched-in while making some online purchases, passwords of your bank accounts etc. It’s needless to say what a stranger would do with your credit card information and other sensitive data once it’s out of your computer.

So, what’s the solution and preventive steps to safeguard your data? Well, before anything else, do you have enough information to deal with your computer’s security?

The security experts at Agnitum have put together a list of Top 15 Internet security related questions that you should be able to answer correctly if you really want to be safe when you’re online. I highly recommend that you take this Security Quiz and test your knowledge on Internet Security.

Disclaimer: This is a paid review that does not require me to provide a positive feedback and does not contain affiliate links. The review has not been edited by the product owner and is written based out of my own trial experience with this product. If you wish to order a review, you may do so here.

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Are Firefox Addons and Plugins Safe to Use?

Raj — Tue, 15 May 2007 15:30:50 +0000

Are you a fan of Firefox and other Mozilla products and enjoying every bit of what they offer? This will be an interesting question for you – Would you know if the add-ons or the plugins that you use for Firefox and other Mozilla products are safe to use?

What is that’s not so safe about them, you might ask. Here is a quick run down of some points worth considering that will tell you why those plugins and add-ons may not be safe to use.

The addons and plugins for many Mozilla products are not certified by Mozilla.
There is no central authority at Mozilla to scan through the plugins to check if the plugins and addons collect information from your system and pass it onto remote servers.
Plugins may not be malicious in nature but poorly coded plugins may indirectly create a security hole that can be exploited to steal information from your browser and computer.

What can you do to safeguard your information?

There are no definitive ways of doing it. You will have to use the plugins and add-ons at your own risk. Having said that, you may want to download plugins and addons from Mozilla’s Add-ons website and also search Google for any known security issues with the plugin before you choose to install them. You may also want to use anti-spyware and other such softwares to alert you when any malicious activity takes place in your computer. This will not help entirely but only mitigate the risk to certain extent and you will still be using the plugins at your own risk till someone actually detects any security issues with the plugins that you use today.

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Bank of America Customers be Aware of This Phishing Attack

Raj — Mon, 14 May 2007 16:40:53 +0000

There have been many phishing attacks happened in the past but this one seems to be a major one with fraudulent emails hitting email accounts and they all are being sent from numerous email addresses. The website address used in this attack are different ones and attempting to trick Bank Of America customers to click on the embedded URLs in the email and provide the remote website with your important banking information. You must delete these emails as soon as you see them in your mailbox if they surpass the email service provider’s spam engines. Below is a screen shot of the email that you might receive.

The URL that you will see in the email will take you to a remote server which will present you with a similar screen that you might see when you use online banking website of Bank of America. Don’t click on the URL for further investigation or to check where it will take you as the remote server could even try to exploit any security holes in your browser to steal your information without your knowledge.

» Learn more about basics of Phishing and preventive measures.

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How To: Anonymous Internet Surfing

Raj — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 07:52:58 +0000

We all know that while surfing Internet we leave our information and whereabouts behind us in the form of IP addresses in the log files on the remote web servers of the sites that we visit. But did you know that this may unknowingly lead you into trouble? How? – Let’s quickly run through a list of scenarios wherein you might want to browse Internet in anonymous mode.

You work for an organization and have been working from a different country. For security reasons your company does not want to let anyone know that you connect to their servers. For this reason alone, you will be required to connect as an anonymous user who can not be traced back.
You work for defense department and connect to the office network from home. You may wish to connect anonymously to protect your identity.
You are visiting your competitor’s website and do not wish to leave anything behind you that can help your competitor determine your visit to their website. In this situation you may want to visit their website as if you were surfing through anonymous proxy server.

The above mentioned scenarios are just few of the hundreds of reasons because of which you may want to surf the Internet as an anonymous user. Now let’s look at how do we become anonymous.

Using Tor: anonymous internet software

Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. Since it uses a distributed and anonymous network, no single point on Internet can link you to your destination. Instead of taking a direct route from source to destination, data packets on the Tor network take a random pathway through several servers that cover your tracks so no observer at any single point can tell where the data came from or where it’s going.

Installing Tor on your system: Browsing anonymous

You will have to download and install the Tor application bundle that will also install a Torbutton plugin for your Firefox browser (using Firefox browser is highly recommended). Post which you may configure your other applications that you want to protect and anonymize, that’s it.

» [Download Tor] | [Documentation of Tor]

Once you install the Tor firefox browser plugin, check your public IP address using whats my ip address service to ensure that you are surfing anonymously.

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Matt Cutts WordPress Blog has been Hacked!

Raj — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 22:42:41 +0000

Matt cutts is currently the head of Google’s Webspam team and frequently blogs on his site.

I am a subscriber to his blog and use Netvibes to read the RSS updates from various sites and since yesterday the blog of Matt cutts was showing up an error message in Netvibes. I initially thought it be to a network related problem due to which Netvibes was not able to reach his blog site but it was only when I typed his blog’s address in the browser, to my shock, I saw this – “This site have been hacked by… message” on his home page (see the snap shot below).

This reminds us how important it is to secure our websites to prevent such hacks happening to our blog. We must ensure that we use safe and strong passwords, disable directory listing and ensure that we always update our wordpress version to the latest release.

Note: This incident coincides with April 1st and if Matt is playing a prank, it’s a nice one.

Update: This eventually turned out to be a prank by Matt Cutts that he setup for April Fool’s Day! and it was a good one!

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WordPress and Website Owners Do You have Directory Listing Enabled?

Raj — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 18:34:32 +0000

Call it my negligence or anything else but since the day I setup this website, I did not care to go back and check if I had taken care to disable directory listing on all the folders in my website. For those who are wondering what Directory Listing is, a simple explanation could be that with Directory Listing enabled, your web server will list or show all the files and folder within a folder that does not has an index file. A nice example is when you open yourdomain.com/wp-includes/ (wordpress only) it will display a listing of all the files and folders within that directory with the directory listing turned on. See the picture below for better understanding of this:

At times this is really not harmful, but if you have uploaded some critical files, like I did, containing your personal information such as passwords list in plain text file then you better think about it and turn the directory listing off as soon as you can! Others who have already turned off directory listing, that’s good!

I usually go through a checklist when I setup new domains and it has a point to turn the directory listing off, but I missed it this time and I had to change all the my passwords which were mentioned in that file (7 accounts in total).

If you happen to be using CPanel, you will find Index Manager option under Site Management, just click on it and have the directory listing turned off! That’s it. You may also use htaccess file to turn off the directory browsing on all your folders if your site contains lot of folders.

If you have some tips for our readers, please don’t forget to post them in the comments here.

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Examine Your Computer’s Security with Belarc Advisor

Raj — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 21:14:24 +0000

Belarc Advisor is a free and personal PC auditing tool, that when run, will build a profile of your Software, Hardware, Patches, Hot Fixes and Anti-Virus Definition status. The results are displayed in a browser window on your system. The information thus collected is not transmitted to remote system and is maintained in your local system only.

The current version of Belarc Advisor runs on Windows 95/98/Me, NT 4, Windows 2000, XP and Windows Server 2003, and requires IE3+, Mozilla Firefox or Opera to display the results. It’s free for personal use and to use it on office systems, you need to purchase licenses.

Positives of Belarc Advisor

Comprehensive and very fast.
All the information is displayed in one sheet which’s very handy and easy to understand.
Results are marked with either green or red color and makes it easy to know the areas requiring immediate attention.
Provides a list of almost all softwares installed on your system and advises which softwares are missing patches.

Negatives of Belarc Advisor

HTML based results. A PDF or some other ready to email file format would have been better.
For a home user, the detail of information could be an overkill. There is just too much info for basic users.
Sometimes information about Microsoft patches is not accurate.

Overall Review

Belarc Advisor not only looks into your hardware but also software, which is the best part of this tool. It will show you softwares which you never thought existed on your system. IT Administrators would love the kind of detailed results it provides with, but a PDF based results would have been better. So much information from a free product, I recommend this for your personal systems.

[Download] your free copy of Belarc Advisor.

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