eSoft Newsletter - August 2006

eSoft News - August, 2006

eSoft InstaGate PRO Awarded "Best Buy" and 5 out of 5 Stars by SC Magazine

InstaGate PRO security appliance has once again been recognized with a rave review and top honors. The August 2006 issue of SC Magazine includes the results of a Multifunction Security Appliance Group Test in which eSoft came out with both 5 out of 5 stars, and their top "SC Magazine Best Buy" honor. eSoft's InstaGate PRO was tested against products from vendors including Fortinet, Secure Computing, ISS, Checkpoint, D-Link, Finjan and others.

In the article, eSoft's InstaGate PRO is described as being feature-rich, easy to use, powerful and flexible. View the entire article and review..

Bell Microproducts and eSoft Partner to Deliver Perimeter Network Security

eSoft, Inc. has recently signed a distribution agreement with Bell Microproducts (NASDAQ: BELM), a Fortune 1000 value-added distributor of high-technology products, solutions and services to the industrial and commercial markets.

As a part of the agreement, Bell Microproducts will distribute eSoft's entire line of InstaGate Integrated Security Gateways and ThreatWall Content Security Gateways.

"The market has experienced a significant increase in spam, virus, spyware and other forms of malware attacks, and Bell Microproducts has been eager to offer a solution that our channel partners can provide to their customers ," said Gary Gammon, V.P. of Enterprise Solutions Marketing at Bell Microproducts. "The eSoft InstaGate and ThreatWall products combine performance, ease of use and great price points for our partners and we are pleased to partner with eSoft in this rapidly growing market ."

Prevent Attacks That Follow "Patch Tuesday"

If you keep your Windows computer up-to-date you are well aware that the last couple of months included several critical updates. eSoft's Threat Prevention Team released signatures for many of these vulnerabilities before they had even been exploited by attackers. IPS signatures are automatically updated from the SoftPak Director as soon as they are released by our research team. This last month is clear evidence of the growing complexity of threats and that the Intrusion Prevention SoftPak is essential in protecting your network from browser exploits, worms and other application level attacks that are discovered daily.

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Tips & Traps

Stop Bounce Relay Spammers with SMTP Verification

by Paul Waterman, eSoft Technical Support

Have you ever had a problem with hundreds or even thousands of bounced email messages to invalid users clogging up your mail queue? If so, you may have been the victim of a spamming technique sometimes called "bounce-relay". If you are using the InstaGate or ThreatWall as your mail server, you can easily emininate the problem by selecting the option to reject mail to invalid users. But what if you are sending mail to an internal mail server? Our suggestion is to use SMTP Verification.

SMTP Verification queries the internal mail server and verifies that the user exists before accepting the mail. The most common problem we see with it, however, is that the internal mail server must be configured to reject mail to users that do not exist.

Steps to reject mail to invalid users in Exchange 2003:
1. Open the "Message Delivery Properties" dialogue box in "Global Settings"
2. Click on the “Recipient Filtering” Tab and check "Filter recipients who are not in the directory"

(Refer to your mail server documentation for help if you use an internal mail server other than Exchange 2003.)

This will reject messages to email addresses that do not exist, saving on system load, unwanted spam, and headaches.

New Collateral:
SpamFilter Training

News Worthy Articles

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