Spam Filtering and Firewall

At Alentus, we backup our high-availability email services with enterprise-class spam and virus protection.

Protecting our Customers. Email has undoubtedly become a key tool for communications among companies worldwide. However, with frequent virus attacks and the alarming rate that spam has been filling up inboxes, email can be a frustrating means of communicating. To protect our customers and combat the growing spam problem, Alentus provides enterprise-class spam and virus protection for all mail servers with top-of-the-line Spam Firewalls from Barracuda Networks.

Protection Against Email-borne Threats - The Barracuda Spam Firewall is a powerful, enterprise-class solution, with each firewall appliance capable of supporting thousands of active email users and handling millions of messages each day. Alentus currently manages 8 Barracuda Spam Firewalls, which provide our customers with comprehensive protection against the most current email-borne threats that can cripple networks if left unprotected. The Barracuda Spam Firewall optimizes performance of our mail servers, while utilizing the following protections:

• Anti-spam The algorithms and methods used by the Barracuda Spam Firewall are the most comprehensive and most advanced in the industry at detecting and filtering spam resulting in the lowest rate of false positives.
  
  
• Anti-virus By utilizing dual layer virus blocking, decompression of archives and file type blocking, the anti-virus engine in the Barracuda Spam Firewall provides complete virus protection.
  
  
• Anti-phishing The Barracuda Spam Firewall provides robust protection against phishing schemes which are often used to gather confidential information about an organization or it's individual users.
  
  
• Anti-spyware (Attachments) All attachments are scanned and any spyware executables are detected and eliminated immediately.
  
• Denial of Service Protection Rate controls are utilized to stop denial of service attacks as well as dictionary based spam attacks. These rate control systems are integrated and automatic in the Barracuda Spam Firewall.
  

Ten Layers of Defense - The Firewall architecture leverages open source virus and spam solutions, in conjunction with ten defense layers:

• Denial of Service and Security Protection
  
  
• IP Block List
  
  
• Rate Control
  
  
• Virus Check with Archive Decompression
  
  
• Barracuda Virus Check
  
  
• User-Specified Rules
  
  
• Spam Fingerprint Check
  
  
• Intent Analysis
  
  
• Bayesian Analysis
  
  
• Rule-Based Scoring

This architecture optimizes the processing of each email message, which yields the performance required to process millions of messages per day. Unlike software solutions, the Barracuda Spam Firewall reduces the load placed on our mail servers by off-loading both spam and virus filtering.