Avinti's iSolation Server enables businesses to have full control over an e-mail system allowing the delivery of attachments and active content without resorting to shutting down the system or removing/quarantining all incoming attachments in the event of new virus outbreaks.

Targeted Attacks are the new threat

Organizations such as Microsoft, The Dept. of Defense and Recording Industry Association of America and many financial institutions are seeing penetration attacks focused specifically on their operation. Here, a hacker will try to deliver a unique threat, unknown to the virus companies, designed to fool an internal user into executing a malicious payload such as a keylogger.

Managing 'seemingly' acceptable attachments

• Compressed Files - zip/winzip/rar/tar/uue

• Office Files - doc/xls/ppt/pdf/eps/mpp/rtf

• Database Files - Access/Foxpro/XML

• Image Files - Jpeg/GIF/bmp/tiff

• Multimedia Files - avi/mp3/mov/wav

• IT Support Files (those files only delivered to IT Specialists) - bat/exe/cab/dll/scr

Allowing delivery of ZIP Files

In many cases, organizations have been forced to block file attachments such as ZIP files, where the file content is probably acceptable but existing anti-virus tools cannot always be relied upon to scan accurately.

iSolation Server to the the rescue!

The iSolation Server prevents e-mail with attachments containing new, unknown outbreak viruses from spreading to unsuspecting users through SMTP e-mail by:

• Intercepting e-mail at the network edge
• Executing and monitoring the e-mail behavior in a secure, virtual environment, and
• Quarantining any e-mail exhibiting malicious behavior before delivery to the target user.

The key difference between the Avinti solution and existing, signature-based antivirus offerings is in it's use of virtual machines to test and examine the actual behavior of e-mail messages.

The Avinti iSolation Server with virtual machine technology:

• Executes e-mail and attachments in a virtual environment at the network edge, before reaching the target user
• Observes the attempted behavior of suspect e-mail to determine its intent
• Quarantines e-mail demonstrating suspicious or malicious behavior
• Enables quarantined e-mails to be analyzed and cleaned by an administrator for future delivery.

iSolation ServerTM works in conjunction with traditional virus scanning technology as part of a layered solution to combat outbreak viruses. Rather than replacing existing virus scanning technology, iSolation Server relies on it as a part of its virus detection method.

As a part of this process, when e-mail from the Internet enters the network, traditional signature-based virus update patterns remove known viruses from the e-mail stream, preventing them from spreading their malicious intent. After profiling the SMTP stream with additional filters, iSolation Server executes the e-mail in a virtual environment, observing the actual behavior of suspect e-mail and quarantining messages displaying malicious intent.

AV scanning with and without iSolation Server