Mail and Web Security Blog

Learn how Symantec’s Brightmail, Mail Security, and Web Gateway technologies help to protect you from today’s messaging and web security threats

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  Created: Duncan Mills 20 May 2013

  Have mergers, acquisitions and changes in vendors’ strategies benefited cloud email and web security customers?

  Part 2 – the impact of the changing threat landscape. In the first part of this 3-part blog we looked at changes in the cloud security industry and how mergers and acquisitions and vendors’ changing strategies have impacted their customers. In part 2 we will look at how the threat landscape has changed and what this means to those organisations that rely on a cloud email and web security vendor. Early entrants into the SaaS email security market quickly realised that they were in a unique position to offer better protection than their competitors that were producing on-premises products. Because they were protecting, in some cases, tens of thousands of customers, they had visibility of the end-to-end flow of millions of emails. This meant they had a significant amount of security intelligence that they could use to identify suspicious emails and protect against zero-day threats. Today it is common for email and web security vendors...
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  Created: Duncan Mills 16 May 2013

  Using Symantec Web Gateway to protect user-owned tablets and smartphones from Internet threats

  The increased use in the workplace of user-owned devices such as smartphones and tablets, often referred to as bring your own device (BYOD), provides businesses with significant productivity and cost benefits. However, it also presents a number of complex challenges related to security. Due to the rise of smart media devices like smartphones, tablets and ultrabooks, it is estimated that potentially, as many as 30-35%* of endpoints connected to a company’s network could be unmanaged. These are more at risk than managed endpoints which are typically subject to software patching and endpoint security policies. Of course unmanaged endpoints are still protected by your perimeter security, such as secure web gateways. However, these have typically evolved from caching proxies and URL filters. What you need is an additional layer of security that provides the best possible levels of protection for unmanaged endpoints. Symantec Web Gateway (SWG) will...
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  Updated: wib3rd 20 May 2013

  Announcing the upcoming Symantec Messaing Gateway 10.5 for Service Providers Beta Evaluation

  Symantec Messaging Gateway 10.5 for Service Providers (Software Edition) Formally known as Symantec Brightmail Message Filter Pre-release Evaluation   On June 25th, 2013 Symantec will be launching the pre-release evaluation of Symantec Messaging Gateway 10.5 for Service Providers. This new version of Symantec Messaging Gateway for Service Providers (Software Edition) plans to introduce new features including.   Name change from Symantec Brightmail Message Filter to Symantec Messaging Gateway for Service Providers Block more Spam and Malware with Expanded Threat URL Reputation and Customer Specific Rules creation capabilities Submit missed Spam and False Positive Emails with new CLI Message Submission process Block Marketing and Newsletter Messages with newly available dispositions Enhanced management of Unscannable Messages   The Symantec Enterprise...
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  Updated: wib3rd 20 May 2013

  Announcing the upcoming Symantec Messaging Gateway 10.5 Beta Evaluation

  Symantec Messaging Gateway 10.5 Pre-release Evaluation   On June 25th, 2013 Symantec will be launching the pre-release evaluation of Symantec Messaging Gateway 10.5. This new version of Symantec Messaging Gateway plans to introduce new features including.   Remove Zero Day Malware and Targeted Attacks from Office and PDF attachments with new “Disarm” technology. Block more Spam and Malware with Expanded Threat URL Reputation Simplify management with LDAP Authenticated Administration Enhanced management of Unscannable Messages Communicate securely with trusted partners using enforced inbound TLS encryption Increase security with TLS encrypted delivery to Symantec DLP Control Spam attacks and message volume from inside the your environment with Outbound Sender Throttling Capability Deploy using new Hyper-V support   The Symantec ...
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  Updated: Duncan Mills 21 May 2013

  Have mergers, acquisitions and changes in vendors’ strategies benefited cloud email and web security customers?

  Part 1 – changes in the industry The email and web security industry has seen many changes over the past years, especially in the cloud or SaaS market. Many vendors in this space started by offering email anti-malware and anti-spam services. They then added email content control and web anti-malware and URL filtering. Some vendors invested heavily, built their own multi-tenant infrastructure, patented their technology and owned intellectual property, whilst others simply purchased and deployed enterprise equipment into datacenters and managed it on behalf of their customers. Some were more serious about security than others, offering multiple signature-based AV engines as well as proprietary protection technologies and elements of data loss prevention. Around the mid 2000s the market became quite crowded, with a number of large cloud email and web security vendors, some mid-sized ones and lots of smaller, local players. In the second half...
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  Updated: Ian McShane 08 Jan 2013

  Upcoming Twitter Chat on Targeted Email Attacks

  Join hashtag #MailSec and learn more about the dangers of targetted email attacks and how to prevent them. Takedowns of large botnet rings in recent years have caused spam numbers to plummet. However, the drop in spam doesn’t make spammers any less dangerous. Spammers have now turned to targeted attacks to reach their victims. As targeted attacks and malware continue to expand and grow in number, and data breaches continue to rise, users and businesses of all sizes need to be aware of what to look out for, and how to protect proprietary information. No business is too big or too small to be a target.   Please join Symantec’s email security experts Ian McShane (@ianmcshane), Paul Murray (@paulsmurray), Matt Cooke (@mattcooke), Paul Wood (@paulowoody)  and Eric Schwake (@lombar77) next Thursday, January 10 at 11 am ET, to discuss targeted attacks and what can be done to prevent them from harming you or your business....
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  Updated: Ian McShane 16 May 2012

  Protecting Cloud Services, Applications and Storage with Symantec Protection Engine

  Did you see my session at Symantec Vision 2012?  If not, you missed me talk about how you need your very own Robocop to protect services, applications and storage that accept and distribute files. His prime directives align very well with how you should approach your service and infrastructure security: 1. Serve the public trust - Your users will TRUST your service.  They'll ignore warnings and common sense because YOU are giving them access to something. 2. Protect the innocent - Your users are unlikely to be as security-aware as you are, they may not understand risks and they certainly shouldn't be trusted to protect themselves :) 3. Uphold the law - You need to be able to set and enforce policies and you need to do this at your...
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  Updated: Ian McShane 20 Mar 2012

  Symantec Email Submission Client (SESC) 1.0: NOW AVAILABLE

    Hi!   My last post back in October 2011 introduced the beta program for a new application for our messaging security customers. I'm delighted to announce that we achieved our Generally Available (GA) milestone yesterday on March 19th meaning that the Symantec Email Submission Client is now available for all of our customers to download and install.  This is my first "1.0" product release so I'm particularly excited to see this product ship :)   Did I mention that this is provided at no extra charge?  Yup, free.   We had some excellent beta participants in this cycle, ranging from large enterprise customers to small businesses and we got some fantastic real world feedback which helped us ship an even better product than we originally scoped.   So, what is SESC?   The Symantec...
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  Updated: Ian McShane 27 Sep 2012

  Announcing the Symantec Email Submission Client Beta

  One of the great things about working in the Messaging & Web Security BU is the amount of cool new technology and functionality we work on.  Some times, this is behind the scenes on our backend systems and other times this is new functionality for existing products. This time, however, I'm really excited to announce the beta program of a brand new application: Symantec Email Submissions Client This application allows you to automate the submission of missed spam (aka false negatives) to Symantec, directly from your end user mailboxes. Symantec Email Submission Client takes advantage of the Exchange Web Services framework built into Microsoft Exchange Server to provide a submissions solution that: Does NOT require any installation to you endpoint devices. Does NOT require any updates to be managed/pushed to your endpoint devices.  ...
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  Created: Ian McShane 02 Aug 2011

  Symantec Protection for Sharepoint Servers 6.0 Beta

  I'm excited to announce that the beta program has started for our next release of Symantec Protection for Sharepoint Servers. You can sign up to this beta at this link : https://symbeta.symantec.com/callout/default.html?callid=8A18C6447CE54D99AD4ADEBCC28E7F9C   With this release, you'll see new features such as:   Completely new quarantine management functionality available through the UI. Brand new user interface. Simple export & import of configuration, settings and policies to enable quick and easy disaster recovery as well as roll out your policies to multiple farms in a quick and efficient manner. This release supports the following platforms: Windows® SharePoint® Services 2.0 (WSS 2.0) Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) ...