Has this happened to you? Let’s say you’re the MDaemon administrator for your company, and you’ve noticed that somewhere, somehow, spam messages are being sent from within your network. Perhaps one of your PCs has been compromised. What do you do? Here are some tips to help you track the issue down.
MDaemon's user-friendly flat-file structure makes it easy to backup and recover your email messages, user accounts, security settings, and any other data stored in MDaemon. No extra Windows components or third-party applications are required, and you won't have to navigate through any confusing dialog boxes to backup & recover your data. Backing up and restoring MDaemon is as easy as drag & drop. All you would need to do is map a drive letter from the MDaemon server to another drive on your network, then drag over the files you want to back up.
With the prevalence of spam circulating the globe in massive amounts, it becomes increasingly important for administrators to understand the potential causes of their IP address ending up on a blacklist. Spammers employ all kinds of tricks to try to send out as many spam messages as possible without revealing their identities. They do this through various techniques such as social engineering, employing malware, botnets, forging of message headers, and exploiting weaknesses in email systems or network infrastructures. For the spammer, it’s basically a numbers game. It costs next to nothing to send out thousands of spam messages, and if even a small handful of people click on a link or purchase a product advertised in a spam message, the spammer can profit.
If your email infrastructure is not properly secured, then you risk being infected with malware and becoming part of a spam botnet. Even if your server is not infected with malware, if your firewall and mail server security settings are not configured properly, your IP address could wind up on a blacklist. To protect yourself from being blacklisted, consider the following recommendations:
How often have you heard someone say “If you’re not doing anything illegal, then you have nothing to hide?” When asked this, I tend to respond with, “OK, then how about you give me the login credentials for all of your email accounts, including the ones you use for personal use?” I think of this as analogous to allowing a stranger to walk around in your house. Hey, it’s OK as long as you’ve got nothing to hide, right? The point is that, no matter what is contained in our electronic data, most of us want peace of mind in knowing that it isn’t being accessed by unauthorized individuals.
Recently, I wrote a post about teaching your MDaemon Inbox to recognize spam using the Bayesian learning feature. This feature helps to train the spam filter to be more accurate over time by feeding it samples of spam and non-spam messages. SecurityGateway also includes Bayesian learning features (in addition to many other security features designed to keep spam, viruses, malware and phishing attacks from hitting your mail server). Today, I’ll be explaining how to use these features to teach SecurityGateway how to get better at recognizing spam (false negatives – spam messages that were not filtered out) and non-spam (false positives – legitimate messages that were marked as spam).
You may have heard the terms SSL and TLS, but do you know what they are and how they’re different?
Ever wonder why so much spam exists today? Though spam volumes have decreased from a high of over 90% of global email traffic, it still makes up roughly a third of that traffic, and though the numbers of junk email messages are decreasing, their malware and ransomware payloads are evolving and becoming much more dangerous. Some of the most common types of spam messages include financial scams, phishing attempts, ransomware, and botnet malware. In this article, we focus primarily on botnets.
