e-Sweeper Features

What does it do?

e-Sweeper is designed to stop content-based threats in your SMTP email stream before they leave your systems. Incoming emails that do not comply with the security policy never get a chance to affect your systems, and outgoing emails that breach the policy are stopped before they can be sent out. e-Sweeper delivers the following protection:

• Controls viruses, even hidden or deeply embedded
• Controls attachments and undesirable content: pornographic material, games and potentially dangerous file types such as executables, documents, images and videos
• Blocks inappropriate language and potentially libelous or defamatory statements
• Blocks Spam and spoofing attacks
• Detects unauthorized encryption
• Controls oversized email messages that can sap bandwidth

If an infection or blocked message type is detected, e-Sweeper will direct the email to a dedicated Quarantine area. Depending on the configuration, warning messages about the breach of security policy can be sent to a network administrator, the intended recipient or the sender.
These messages can contain details of the content analysis so that their recipients can understand the exact nature of the threat and take appropriate action. Through Quarantine, authorized personnel have the choice of deleting, releasing or copying messages as required.

Protection from viruses

e-Sweeper provides exceptional protection against viruses because it understands all the ways viruses can be transported via email. It breaks down the traffic to its original state (recursive disassembly) before passing to our anti-virus tool for virus protection/cleaning.

Here's an example: an email with a ZIP file attachment. The Zip file contains a Word document. The spreadsheet contains an embedded Excel spreadsheet. The sender does not realize that within the document there is a Macro virus just waiting to run. A standard anti-virus scanner may not pick the infection up - but e-Sweeper will, because it undoes and scans through all the different layers rather than just relying on the top layer or file extensions.

In addition, e-Sweeper is updated from a Threat Lab that develops fast remedies to emerging threats such as new virus alerts, benefiting from close partnerships with major anti-virus vendors. E-Sweeper automatically receives updates of the latest anti-virus data (several times a day if necessary), allowing our customers a very fast response: there is no need for you to visit a web site to download new virus signature information manually. For example, when the "Love Bug" worm started to spread, within a few hours e-Sweeper was able to scan for it and prevent it from affecting our customer's systems.

Protection from attachments and undesirable content

e-Sweeper lets you set your own policies on acceptable and unacceptable employee email use; for example, you might wish to limit employees' ability to send and/or receive attached movie, image, executable and document file types. These files may be used for the transfer of pornographic material or games, or could contain hidden viruses. This policy can be applied according to the individual or group: the work of the Marketing department might mean that it would need to send and receive video and executable files, but there is no requirement for users in Accounts, Sales and Administration departments to have the same rights.

e-Sweeper identifies file types by their internal structure, not simply the file extension. So even if a virus sender renames an .exe file with an innocent-looking .txt or .doc extension, e-Sweeper will know it is an executable. Similarly, a .jpg graphic could be disguised as an .xls spreadsheet, but e-Sweeper would know its true identity. This makes e-Sweeper more sophisticated than some rival solutions that rely solely on extension blocking.

Protection from inapproprate language and libelous/defamatory comments

e-Sweeper helps you protect yourself against misuse of email by employees. This helps limit exposure to legal liability in a number of ways:

• Enforcing effective implementation of an Acceptable Use Policy for email
• Scanning for key words and phrases to prevent defamation or breaches of confidentiality
• Attaching disclaimers to inbound and outbound emails that establish whether the sender is writing on behalf of the company or in a personal capacity

By taking these steps as part of their security policy, businesses demonstrate responsibility, diligence and care in monitoring usage of email. Even if there is a breach of policy, this can strengthen your defense against charges of negligent behavior.

Protection from spam and spoofing

e-Sweeper provides powerful measures to stop company networks being bombarded with Spam (unsolicited junk email). Its advanced capabilities also check for spoofing (emails that claim to have been sent from one address when they have been sent from somebody else, one of the favorite tools of senders of junk and malicious email).

So before the Spam is sent to the company network, e-Sweeper:

• Scans for typical junk email and Spam phrases, preventing delivery of virus payloads or large unsolicited file attachments
• Blocks known Spam addresses using the Real-Time Blacklist (dependent on deployment)
• Identifies tell-tale signs of possible spoofing, preventing situations where users might respond to mail that they assume has been sent by somebody they know, possibly with company-confidential information

Protection from unathorized encryption

Encrypted email can be a legitimate method of business communication and you may wish to allow this type of email. However, you may wish to stop this type of email as it can still contain Content Security threats such as executables, confidential data and defamatory comments. e-Sweeper can detect if email is encrypted, and either allow or block depending on your policy.

Protection from oversized email messages that can sap bandwidth

You can set limits for file size, and specify whether large files e.g. over 2MB, should be blocked, logged or "parked" for delivery outside normal office hours. This ensures that high network bandwidth stays available for legitimate business use.

Tried and trusted technology

When you choose e-Sweeper, you'll be in good company. e-Sweeper is based on MIMEsweeper, the industry-leading family of Content Security solutions which are designed to stop email and Web content threats before they reach the organizations network. Today, over 6,000 customers and 6 million network users worldwide rely on our MIMEsweeper family of products for comprehensive protection.