RE: Outsourcing spam filtering and secuirty

[jburzenski () americanhm com]

Tony,

I will attempt ot respond to your inquiry about outsourcing spam filtering.
Outsourcing certain functions of 'security' is generally a trusted practice
as long as you are working with a reputable firm.

In regards to outsourcing of spam filtering, it depends on the business.  By
performing gateway level filtering of this nature, you are effectively
routing all inbound mail (from the Internet) through a third party service.
So all inbound communication can be monitored.  It may be prudent for a
vendor to provide you with documentation describing the security measures
they have in place to prevent unintended capture of you mail traffic.  

You may also be concerned about the false positive review process (if
mentioned in the SLA).  There may be sensative emails that are accidentally
sent to the spam quarantine and are reviewed by vendor ops personnel.  

Personally, I don't like the idea of outsourcing this task and you should
weight the reasons for doing so against the reasons for keeping this
in-house.  


If you are interested in saving some money on this project while bringing
the service in-house, you should consider MailScanner
(http://www.mailscanner.info).  This is an open-source product that is easy
to setup and configure and also has commericial support options in case you
need help.  It works very well.

Jason



-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Brisco [mailto:tony_brisco () yahoo com] 
Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2003 11:22 PM
To: security-basics () securityfocus com
Subject: Outsourcing spam filtering and secuirty


Hi,

Is trusting third party with the corporation's MX
records for spam filtering purposes is widely used ?
Accepted ?  And how secure ?

I appreciate in advance your comments and suggestions.

Tony Brisco   

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---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Captus Networks 
Are you prepared for the next Sobig & Blaster? 
 - Instantly Stop DoS/DDoS Attacks, Worms & Port Scans 
 - Precisely Define and Implement Network Security 
 - Automatically Control P2P, IM and Spam Traffic 
FIND OUT NOW -  FREE Vulnerability Assessment Toolkit 
http://www.captusnetworks.com/ads/42.htm
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