Using open source security technology to create open source email Security Gateway

Simple three steps to solve the enterprise spam problem

In the United States, open source technology has infiltrated many enterprises, for IT staff, the impact of open source has been expanding. But in China, corporate users ' awareness of open source remains largely Linux. Open source Email Security Gateway, open source intrusion detection, open source vulnerability analysis, open source VPN These emerging technologies have greatly stimulated the nerves of the IT staff. There is reason to believe that in the near future, open source security technology will serve more Chinese enterprises.

According to a recent survey by Network World, more than 70% of U.S. companies recognize the role of open source tools, with one-third of IT managers planning to deploy open-source tools within a year. You know, this number means that the security, stability and maintainability of open source tools have been recognized by the market.

Of course, the more exciting is still behind. According to the survey, in the face of changing security threats, more than half of American IT managers believe that an effective way to confront threats is to "storm the Storm"-using information security tools based on open source to counter traditional or unconventional security threats.

The reporters were unable to investigate the true ideas of the managers, but the superficial answers were more representative, more flexible, full of the thrill of the source code, the ability to control the company's own security, and to be tailored to its own needs, with a lower cost. Given these factors, open source security products for free use abound.

Open Source Email Security Gateway

According to the IDC survey, nearly 80% of U.S. IT managers believe that e-mail security gateways are the best case for open source products to meet the needs of the enterprise for flexibility.

In fact, the functionality of this gateway has been progressively transformed from interoperability between messaging systems to the security of the messaging system. In other words, the primary task of a mail security gateway is to prevent spam and virus attacks. However, with the development of network technology, the new open source mail security gateway also needs to have the need to prevent phishing and meet the compliance of enterprise laws and regulations.

Security experts said that the current foreign mail security Gateway Market situation continues to change rapidly: commercial products quickly enter or leave the market, demand is also rapidly changing. If an enterprise chooses an open source solution (at which point they can build their own gateways with multiple components), it gets a high degree of flexibility, even though they still have to pay a huge amount of integration effort.

As America's more popular "open source security technology to help the model"--spamassassin is the choice of many enterprises open source anti-spam security tool. The tool is so powerful that it becomes the core of several commercial security products, including popular Barracuda mail gateways.

However, SpamAssassin is still a long way from entering the core of the network of large enterprises. Some American users have reflected that, after using the tool, enterprises must develop (or adapt existing open source) web-based front-end applications in order to find a framework that extends across multiple systems.

In addition, SpamAssassin requires companies to work with user isolation for suspicious messages while providing messaging tools, regular isolation management tools, reporting and alerting tools, and system management tools. As a result, these enterprises need to use a message transfer agent (such as postfix) to wrap the SpamAssassin to send, receive e-mail, and establish e-mail queues.

Domestic users need to be reminded that more and more open source mail security gateways are coming into the country, such as MailWasher and Mailguard, who integrate antivirus engines, management tools and isolation capabilities. Unfortunately, there is no product that has a large and active development and user community like SpamAssassin.

However, SpamAssassin itself is not perfect, it is not in the forefront of spam recognition. At present, in anti-spam technology, based on the "reputation" of the filter system and a good combination of content filters, the effect is very good, while the Sender ID and the domain keys and other new protocols can help combat phishing attacks. As a result, IT managers believe that a "reputation based" system, such as Spamhaus or SPAMCOP, which is available for free use, can be effectively integrated with other anti-spam tools.

In fact, this is not impossible, but requires expertise in email Security Gateway design and open source applications. Antivirus functionality is also the function of any mail security network. The only trusted open source option is ClamAV, after all, a company that chooses Linux for e-mail gateways can also choose several commercial engines running on UNIX.

Other anti-spam engines, such as CRM114, Dspam, and Bogofilter, are not as popular as spamassassin in large-scale environments because they rely on user training to achieve very high spam capture rates. However, companies that build their own custom gateways will experiment with various filtering tools to determine if it really suits them.