SOPHOS PUREMESSAGE - INTEGRATED SPAM & VIRUS PROTECTION

Sophos PureMessage prevents spam and viruses from entering your company, and allows you to enforce a communications policy across your business. Sophos PureMessage is the ideal consolidated solution for large organizations who wish to protect against viruses and spam.

PureMessage's industry-leading anti-spam technology safely identifies up to 98% of spam, resulting in inboxes free of unsolicited bulk emails. Flexible configuration options allow businesses to uniquely define their spam identification and handling policies (e.g. delete, quarantine, archive). PureMessage also checks all email traffic passing through your email server, providing an extra layer of protection against mass-mailing worms and viruses. This means viruses can be stopped from entering your company at the gateway and spreading throughout your network.

PureMessage's policy enforcement technology allows companies to tackle the problems of email misuse (such as confidentiality breaches, legal liability, lost productivity and damage to reputation). Sophos PureMessage is the ideal consolidated solution for large organizations who wish to protect against viruses and spam.

Enterprise Email Protection

Driven by mounting pressures to ensure a secure and low-cost infrastructure, organizations are increasingly demanding single-point protection against security threats such as viruses, spam, and policy breaches.

PureMessage Features

• Multi-faceted threat protection - Leverage policies that combine anti-spam, anti-virus, and policy enforcement, to protect against multi-faceted spam, virus, DHA and DoS attacks—such as the Sobig email-borne virus and DoS email attacks—as they arise.
• Leading anti-virus protection - Prevent malicious code from entering or spreading via email. Scan for all known and unknown viruses, with automatic updates for up-to-the-minute protection.
• Leading anti-spam protection - Remove up to 98% of spam from the message stream at the gateway, using a balanced combination of tests to separate spam from legitimate mail.
• Robust policy enforcement - Ensure policy compliance with over 30 pre-bundled message-handling tests, rules, and actions, for easily defining and enforcing acceptable use and receipt policies at the gateway.
• Innovative technical leadership - The first enterprise solution to provide adaptive spam filtering, destination URL filtering, image spam protection, quarantine digests, and policy management interface.
• Automatic updates - Anti-virus and anti-spam updates are automatically delivered and seamlessly deployed as new threats arise.
• Distributed administration - Easily assign administrative access privileges (e.g. quarantine management, monitoring, and reporting).
• Central Server Management - Centralize configuration, synchronization, and reporting across multiple mail servers.
• Perimeter protection - Monitor the velocity of inbound and outbound connections, automatically taking action when suspicious traffic patterns are detected.

Anti-Virus Protection

Research shows that your business is more likely to receive a virus through your email gateway than through any other route.

Sophos PureMessage checks all email traffic passing through your email server in real-time, providing protection against mass-mailing worms and viruses, including the latest multi-faceted attacks that combine virus, spam and DoS attacks. Viruses are stopped at the gateway, before they can proliferate within a corporate network.

Sophisticated threat reduction technology provides a powerful ability to prevent even new, unknown email-aware worms from entering your business without having to update your anti-virus solution. PureMessage automatically checks executable content and files in email for malicious code and applies the appropriate policy to handle the message actions for fast and reliable protection.

• Safeguard intellectual property from damage by virus attacks
• Protect your network and other assets from virus attack in real-time
• Protect reputations by guarding against delivery of a virus to a partner or customer

Real-time protection from:

• Virus-driven email outbreaks
• Worms
• Viruses
• Trojans
• Malicious code
• Suspicious attachments

Advantages

• Multi-faceted protection - Establish automatic policies that protect against multi-faceted spam, virus, DHA and DoS attacks—such as the Sobig email-borne virus and DoS email attacks—as they arise
• Outbreak protection - Message velocity monitoring detects and protects against virus-driven DoS type attacks and behavior, shielding organizations from infection and server outages during virus outbreaks
• Easily deployed gatewy protection - Gateway level virus protection simplifies deployment. Users within the network are automatically protected, and all outbound email is automatically scanned from one central location. Organizations stay up-to-date and protected, even when individual workstations are not.
• Automatic updates - Automatic virus signature updates of continuously protect against the latest threats.
• Flexible virus handling - Define virus handling as part of an overall message handling policy. Virus cleaning ensures message delivery while preventing transmission.

Anti-Spam Protection

PureMessage can effectively stop spam during the delivery process, eliminating the productivity loss, liability exposure, and resource drain that accompanies unsolicited email.

Industry-leading anti-spam technology safely removes up to 98% of spam at the gateway, using a balanced combination of the latest, most effective anti-spam technologies. Quarantine digests remove administrative intervention to retrieve valid messages blocked by spam filters, eliminating the business impact of false positives.

• Maximize administrative efficiency
• Increase corporate productivity through efficient email usage
• Improve network resource and bandwidth usage, mail server load and storage demand
• Protect your organization from potential 'hostile environment' lawsuits

Real-time protection from:

• Open proxies and relays
• Dial-up account spamming
• Known spammers
• Current spam campaigns
• Image spam
• HTML obfuscations

Advantages

• Effective spam protection
  Safely remove up to 98% of spam from the message stream at the gateway.
• Eliminates the business impact of false positives - Quarantine digests enable end users to retrieve valid messages blocked by spam filters, eliminating the business impact of false positives. The digests provide end users with convenient access to their quarantined messages through their email inbox, without administrative intervention or additional tools.
• Automatic updates - Daily updates automate protection against new spam messages and evolving spam techniques.
• Comprehensive spam detection - "Cocktail" approach combines multiple techniques into a single spam probability, for increased accuracy over easily defeated single technique or layered methodologies.
• Cutting-edge technology - Innovative research from the PureMessage Anti-spam Task Force protects users with with the latest, most effective spam protection techniques, including recent PureMessage innovations: destination URL filtering and adaptive gateway filtering.
• Unmatched spam handling flexibility - Combining tests to determine an overall spam probability affords greater control and flexibility in spam handling and tuning precision. Customizable user preferences and privileges—including user-specific opt-in/out privileges, thresholds, digests and spam handling preferences—deliver unmatched flexibility.
• Proprietary spam detection - Spam identification tests are not publicly available or running on large public email systems. Spammers have no visibility into mail filtering, reducing their ability to innovate against PureMessage detection techniques.

Policy Enforcement

The flexible Sophos PureMessage policy manager is a set of proactive internal controls for ensuring compliance, enabling organizations to easily define, configure, monitor, and enforce their message handling policies. The powerful RFC 3028-compliant policy framework enables organizations to define, control and enforce their message handling policies. Administrators can configure the framework with ready-to-implement tests, rules, and actions to meet their specific policy needs.

• Ensure compliance with regulatory agencies and commissions
• Protect against liability exposure from inappropriate communications
• Protect against internal security breaches and external attacks

Real-time protection from:

• Confidentiality breaches
• Legal liability
• Lost productivity
• Damage to reputation
• Acceptable use policy risks
• Regulatory compliance risks

Advantages

• Integrated policy management
  Multiple, integrated spam, virus, and acceptable use policies provide a single policy management interface for both inbound and outbound messages.
• Sieve-based email policy
  Policy management is built on top of a powerful, RFC 3028-compliant Sieve-based policy platform, enabling administrators to define policies of appropriate complexity.
• Policy builder interface
  Configuration GUI streamlines definition of organizational message handling policies.
• Ready to implement policies
  Includes over 30 pre-bundled tests, actions, and configuration mechanisms for spam, virus, and most common email policies.
• Flexible policy framework
  Hierarchical framework configured to include multiple tests and multiple actions enables organizations to easily calibrate enforcement techniques.
• Perimeter protection
  Monitors the velocity of gateway connections for anomalous traffic patterns and adjusts automatically based on attack severity.
• Content based routing or archiving
  Messages can be automatically analyzed, routed to the appropriate recipients, and archived in compliance with regulatory requirements.

Sophos PureMessage can be administered through the PureMessage Manager, an easy-to-use web console providing an integrated interface for managing policies and configuration information, accessing the quarantine, and reporting on activity.

Administrative features:

• Integrated management of the PureMessage system
• Consolidated configuration of all filters, tests, and policy actions
• Granular control of filtering preferences
• Anti-spam rule tuning
• Monitoring service activity and availability
• Scheduling auto-updates
• Quarantine management
• Reporting
• Multi-server synchronization

Powerful Policy Builder
The PureMessage Policy Manager features a flexible, easy-to-use web-based interface for managing and testing the overall PureMessage filtering policy, including specifying the behavior and order of rules and actions applied to messages. Using the manager, administrators can use PureMessage's ready-to-implement message handling tests, rules, and actions to easily configure and enforce organization-specific policies.

Quarantine Management

Quarantine Manager
Using the Quarantine Manager, administrators can search and review spam or virus-laden messages and take further action as desired, including archiving, approving for delivery, forwarding, and deletion.

Quarantine Digests
Quarantine Digests keep spam messages out of the mail infrastructure, and enable end users to easily review and release blocked messages, eliminating the business impact of false positives. End users receive scheduled summaries of quarantined messages that they can review and release from their email client, without administrative intervention or additional tools.

Reporting
PureMessage reporting provides measurable feedback on message filtering activity. Reports monitor filter activity through visual, scheduled, and exportable data for the message stream and quarantine contents.

Centralized Server Management
Central server management simplifies administration by synchronizing servers, consolidating reporting, and enabling multiple servers to share a single configuration in multiple-server environments.

System Requirements

Hardware
  150MB hard disk space (includes space for Perl and sendmail installations)
  1GB memory minimum
  100Mbit network or better (if using PureMessage via network)

Operating Systems
  Linux on x86 (RedHat 6.0 or later, or Debian 2.1 or later)
  Solaris on sparc (2.6 or later)
  HP-UX on PA_RISC1.1 (11.0 or later)
  FreeBSD on x86 (4.1-RELEASE or later)
  AIX on RISC (4.3.3 or later)

PureMessage provides interoperability with any corporate email system. In addition to native support for sendmail, PureMessage acts as an email gateway and can be deployed for use with any existing MTA.