Re: Securing email by inhibiting urls

["Mark E. Donaldson" <markee () bandwidthco com>]

You need to re-think how you handle mail. Two things:


1.       Take out all Chinese IP addresses at the firewall. Nothing of value comes out of China. 99% of it is toxic. 
Why let them even have a chance?



2.       Direct webmail over the internet is dangerous at best. You need to set up an SMTP mail proxy on your system 
that receives, processes, and either accepts or rejects all incoming email. Use Sendmail + MailScanner + SpamAssassin + 
Clamav. Won't cost you a cent and will take all bad stuff out as you instruct it to do.


3.       Mail that makes it through the proxy should then be directed to the webmail server. It will be safe and clean.

From: firewall-wizards-bounces () listserv cybertrust com [mailto:firewall-wizards-bounces () listserv cybertrust com] 
On Behalf Of Chris
Sent: Monday, August 01, 2011 11:47 AM
To: firewall-wizards () listserv cybertrust com
Subject: [fw-wiz] Securing email by inhibiting urls

A company I work for has been having great difficulty in securing against email attacks.  So far we have disabled 
access to webmail, implemented  rules and processes to block freemail services like hotmail etc until the sender 
registers the address and of course a spam filter (BrightMail).  Attachment filtering is pretty strict as well.

The threat that presents the biggest challenge is url links in emails.  The common method of attack is an email from 
somedomain.com where they change one character or otherwise make the address look valid (ie: joe () s0medomain 
com<mailto:joe () s0medomain com> or j0e () somedomain com<mailto:j0e () somedomain com> etc).

I was looking for a way to spot and block hyperlinks but it looks like the only option I have is to filter on these and 
send them to a spam bin.  I'd rather yank the offending hyperlink and replace it with a message of some sort.  
Unfortunately BrightMail doesn't offer that capability.

Any products that do this or ideas on a solution?

Thanks

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