IBM Proventia Network Mail Security System - MS3004

Overview:

IBM Proventia Network Mail Security System provides preemptive protection and spam control for your messaging infrastructure. Proventia Network Mail helps to enforce outbound content compliance and acceptable use policies with customizable analysis modules, easily adapted to varying company needs. Proventia Network Mail is a key element in the IBM Internet Security Systems protection platform, which provides end-to-end, preemptive protection against threats to endpoints, servers, networks and gateways.

Highlights:

• Protects e-mail users against spam
• Recognizes and blocks zero-day virus variants
• Blocks more than 120,000 known viruses
• Provides customized event reporting
• Delivers 24x7 tech support

Keeping spam, viruses and other malicious traffic at bay
IBM Proventia Network Mail Security System from IBM Internet Security Systems (IBM ISS) provides preemptive protection and spam control for the corporate messaging infrastructure. Easily adaptable to the needs of specific organizations, Proventia Network Mail includes customizable analysis modules to enforce outbound content compliance and acceptable use policies. Proventia Network Mail is a key element in the IBM ISS protection platform providing end-to-end coverage of an organization's network, with leading solutions to security challenges that threaten key endpoints, servers, networks and gateways.

Designed to provide protection to organizations of all sizes, Proventia Network Mail is available as both a hardware appliance and a virtual appliance. In either form factor, Proventia Network Mail receives automatic updates to keep spam, viruses and other malicious traffic at bay. Proventia Network Mail is backed by IBM ISS, the leader in preemptive enterprise security.

Proventia Network Mail Delivers
Today's mail security problem is multifaceted and constantly changing. To respond effectively, today's mail security solution must combine highly effective antispam technologies with complete preemptive protection. Proventia Network Mail's customizable anti-spam and content filtering offer a strong defense against spam and phishing attempts, and its compliance analysis modules provide the flexibility required to support internal use policies and industry-specific messaging regulations. These technologies work in concert with IBM ISS preemptive protection modules, which incorporate ISS' award-winning Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) engine and Sophos behavioral genotype anti-virus technology to protect against viruses, spyware, and denial-of-service (DOS) attacks. Proventia Network Mail also includes a new first line of defense against spam - dynamic host reputation filtering. This filtering feature is capable of recognizing and block spam sources, protecting your network bandwidth. These precision technologies, blended into a single solution, protect your messaging infrastructure from today's inbound and outbound threats, making your current anti-spam solution seem simply inadequate.

Spam Control and More – Proventia Network Mail antispam is effective out-of-the-box to shield productivity and prevent strains on network capacity, recognizing spam in more than 40 languages. Proventia Network Mail is automatically updated to provide protection against new spam types, including image-based spam. In addition, Proventia Network Mail includes customizable analysis modules to enforce outbound content compliance and acceptable use policies. Use Proventia Network Mail to quickly and easily define individual, group, or global policies to streamline your email system. Proventia Network Mail supports Transport Layer Security (TLS) for encrypting messages between e-mail gateways.

Preemptive Threat Management – Proventia Network Mail is the only email security solution equipped with the IBM Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) engine and Sophos behavioral genotype anti-virus technology, along with remote malware detection and Sophos signature-based anti-virus. This solution also includes protection against phishing attacks, helping guard your employees against divulging personal information to malicious requestors.

Intelligent Management Options – Proventia Network Mail offers multiple management options to enhance ease of use, including a web-based local management interface and advanced clustering management options, scaling from single user installation to the needs of large enterprises. Proventia Network Mail also cleanly integrates with Proventia Management SiteProtector, one of the most comprehensive security management solutions in the world. Proventia Network Mail Security System is now available in two form factors, to support the needs of both small and large customer environments. Regardless of whether your company's environment is better suited by a hardware appliance or virtual appliance, Proventia Network Mail keeps spam, viruses and other malicious traffic at bay.

Features & Benefits:

Key Features:

Today's mail security problem is multifaceted. Our multi-layered solution is designed to address the complete spectrum of security threats affecting your e-mail infrastructure.

Protection Features:

• Antispam Technology – Proventia Network Mail offers unmatched antispam technology, including a multi-dimensional 10-Step Analysis Process. Proventia Network Mail's more than 20 analysis modules can be further customized to meet the needs of your unique messaging environment. Proventia Network Mail can be quickly configured to block spam using default policies. ISS spam protection technologies combine daily updates with fresh spam data (signatures, URLs, etc.) from the ISS Global Data Center and local e-mail scanning technologies for highly efficient spam filtering.
• Anti-Phishing – Proventia Network Mail includes built-in protection for your employees against e-mails targeting their personal information.
• Dynamic Host Reputation Filtering – Proventia Network Mail analyzes the behavior of IP addresses to help detect and control the spam flood at the connection layer, preventing many spam messages from reaching your employee or administrator quarantines and decreasing strain on your network bandwidth.
• Compliance – Proventia Network Mail includes customizable analysis modules to enforce outbound content compliance and acceptable use policies.
• Proventia Filter Database – World's largest and most up-to-date filter database, includes 100+ million entries based on analysis of 8.8 billion URLs, Images, and Spam Heuristics.
• End User Control – Each end user is empowered to create their own Allow and Block lists, giving each personalized control over his own spam preferences. More advanced end user control is possible as defined by an administrator.
• Email Encryption – Proventia Network Mail supports Transport Layer Security (TLS) for encrypting messages between e-mail gateways.
• Granular Policy Management – Proventia Network Mail affords instant access to rules configuration for ease of use, lessening the burden on administrative staff. Granular policy access includes simple rules-based policy creation (i.e., who – what – when – action) and more than 10 different action types (i.e., modifications, notifications).
• Sophos behavioral genotype anti-virus technology – Analyzing both incoming and outgoing e-mail in parallel with antispam policies, Sophos behavioral genotype anti-virus technology helps block undiscovered zero-day virus threats in real time. When combined with traditional signature-based antivirus, you have an unprecedented level of virus protection, helping you avoid costly outbreaks.
• Remote Malware Detection – This technology combines the benefits of behavioral anti-virus with the global reach of our filter database, addressing viral attachments collected in the Proventia Filter Database's spam traps.
• Intrusion Prevention System – Both Proventia Network Mail and your mail server are protected from attack. Proventia's multi-faceted protection engine combines multiple analysis and detection methodologies for optimum accuracy.
• High Performance – Proventia Network Mail protects at the speeds necessary to keep your messaging infrastructure at optimum productivity.¹

Management Features:

• Centralized Management System – Reporting and administration are also fully integrated with Proventia Management SiteProtector™. Proventia SiteProtector is used to manage Proventia Network Mail—together with other ISS solutions—in accordance with your overall security strategy with minimum staff and operational costs. SiteProtector scales easily for large global enterprises and capitalizes on 10 years of security research and experience, utilizing world-renowned X-Force® threat analysis.
• Web-based Local Management – Proventia Network Mail's web-based local management interface (LMI) simplifies device setup, management and monitoring.
• Clustering / High Availability – Proventia Network Mail supports large or high-demand enterprises. With no separate management console required, customers can easily manage multiple boxes through one appliance.²
• World Class Support – ISS offers 24/7 global support and service for all components of Proventia Network Mail Security System, including platform updates, technical support and Advanced Exchange replacement.

Spam Control:

Spam continues to find its way to inboxes daily, typically outnumbering legitimate e-mail. The fight against spam negatively impacts productivity and strains network capacity, affecting the end user as well as the messaging administrator. With its core protection technologies, Proventia Network Mail lightens the spam burden in several ways.

Proventia Network Mail can be configured quickly to block spam using either default or custom content filtering policies. Content filtering innovation is provided by the IBM Internet Security Systems X-Force® research and development team. The X-Force team constantly monitors new spam techniques and distribution methods. Protection is thereby transferred to your organization via at least eight daily updates that include new spam signatures and potentially dangerous URL’s. As a result, Proventia Network Mail helps you keep ahead of the latest spam trends, including social penny stock schemes and image-based spam.

IBM ISS spam protection technologies employ a service model, which, in addition to the daily updates from the IBM ISS GLobal Data Center, also employs local e-mail scanning technologies that increases the efficiency of spam filtering. IBM does this by operating thousands of spam collectors worldwide using e-mail accounts, also known as “honey pots,” to attract spammers. These e-mail accounts receive hundreds of thousands of confirmed spam e-mail messages every day. From here, all spam collectorsfeed their data into the Global Data Center for processing. In addition, IBM ISS has established a network of trusted partners that provide new spam data for the Global Data Center. The IBM Proventia Network Mail Filter database housed in the Global Data Center contains more than 80 million entries including Web pages and relevant spam signatures as of 2007. With the optional Spam Learn feature, IBM ISS offers anonymous, automated reporting of new spam back to the IBM ISS Global Data Center for inclusion in the database.

Proventia Network Mail’s 20+ analysis modules can be further customized to meet the needs of your unique messaging environment.
Proventia Network Mail combines multiple analysis modules for further specificity and administrators can define policies or tailor analysis modules to enforce compliance. Messages can also be scanned for offensive words, keywords and attachment types, and specialized analysis modules prevent Social Security and credit card numbers from leaving your network. In addition, the phishing analysis module combines multiple analysis techniques to protect your employees against e-mail messages that target their personal information.

Proventia Network Mail affords instant access to rules configuration for ease of use, lessening the burden on administrative staff.
Granular policy access includes simple rules-based policy creation (e.g., who–what–when–action) and more than ten different action types (e.g., modifications, notifications). Policies can be applied globally, per user group or per individual user. col (LDAP), including IBM Lotus® Notes®/Domino® and Microsoft® Active Directory. End users can control their own allow and block lists, giving them personalized control over their own spam preferences. They can also view and control their quarantined messages if granted permission by an administrator.

Technical Specifications:

Proventia Network Mail Security System Comparison Matrix:

Uncompromising Protection for Every Layer of Your Network

Preemptive protection and spam control for your messaging infrastructure.

Proventia Network Mail Security System
Model:
	MS1002-VM	MS3004
Typical Deployment	Messaging Gateway	Network perimeter
Maximum Recommended Nodes/Users	< 1,000 – Scales to hardware	10,000
Security Content Updates	Powered by X-Force; signature antivirus by Sophos	Powered by X-Force; signature antivirus by Sophos
Form Factor	Virtual Appliance	U2 Appliance
Capabilities Summary
Intrusion Prevention	Yes	Yes
Intrusion Detection	Yes	Yes
Antivirus (behavior-based)	Yes	Yes
Antivirus (signature-based)	Yes	Yes
Content Filtering	Yes	Yes
Protected segments	Yes (see also, Mail Security Fetarues)	Yes (see also, Mail Security Fetarues)
Web Application/ Database Protection	No	No
VoIP Security	No	No
Spyware Prevention	Yes	Yes
VPN	No	No
Hardware-Related Specifications
Monitoring or scanning interfaces	Two interfaces	4 x 10/100/1000 Copper
Inline protected segments	Unlimited MX records	Unlimited MX records (10,000 users)
Throughput available	Scales to hardware	36,000 messages/hr
Concurrent sessions (rated maximum)	1024 (default setting)	1024 (default setting)
Maximum connection per second	Scales to hardware	10 messages/sec*
High Availability/ Failover	Not available	Not available
Host Protection Featrues
Log Auditing	N/A	N/A
Application Control	N/A	N/A
Buffer Overflow Exploit Protection	N/A	N/A
Supported Operating Systems/Platforms	N/A	N/A
Vulnerability Management Features
Scanning Discovery	N/A	N/A
Asset Classification	N/A	N/A
Vulnerability Assessment	N/A	N/A
Scanning Windows	N/A	N/A
Workflow Solution	N/A	N/A
Results Reporting	N/A	N/A
Mail Security Features
Spam detection rate	>98%	>98%
False positive rate	<.01% (1 in 10,000)	<.01% (1 in 10,000)
Spam and compliance analysis modules	Yes (20+ Customizable)	Yes (20+ Customizable)
Anti-phishing/Image-based Spam	Yes	Yes
Granular policy control	Yes	Yes
Global/group/user settings	Yes	Yes
End user access	Yes	Yes

* Based on real world message flow, containing messages of varying sizes including variants with attachments and/or images

Documentation:

Download the IBM Proventia Network Mail Security System Datasheet (PDF).

Download the IBM Proventia Network Mail Security System Brochure (PDF).