Spam at GNRA brought under control overnight by credativ Open Security filter
credativ Open Security Filter saves the day at GNRA
September 2007 - credativ Open Security Filter is deployed for public sector client
About Glasgow North Regeneration Agency
Glasgow North Regeneration Agency (GNRA) is a not-for-profit organisation. It is one of five local Regeneration Agencies which make up Glasgow’s Regeneration Agencies. GNRA operates a wide variety of economic activities, all with a view to stimulate the local economy.
These activities are carried out via financial support provided by funders such as Scottish Enterprise, European Funding, Community Planning Partnership and Glasgow City Council. GNRA operates across north Glasgow from its St Rollox office in Springburn, as well as offices in Possil, Royston, Milton, Maryhill and a number of additional outreach locations. GNRA employs 130 email and internet users over 15 sites.
The Challenge
GNRA receives on average 400 emails per day. Email communication across its offices, with its partner organisations and those clients that it assists is paramount to the smooth running of the organisation. Since its foundation in 1990, the volume of email communications has grown and with that GNRA started to receive a high level of spam. The unsolicited emails gradually reached a point where it became an annoyance and inconvenience.
Spam email and general internet use presented a potentially more serious threat to GNRA’s computers. Clicking on infected spam and infected websites, could potentially allow hackers to scan and hijack systems and turn them into botnets for the spreading of spam and malware - and this was a threat that GNRA's IT team wanted to avoid.
Requirements
To protect its network, GNRA needed a solution that could identify and reject spam and prevent the introduction of malware to the organisation via the internet.
GNRA was looking for a solution to secure all desktops that was flexible enough to provide integrated internet security, could be managed centrally and offered a one-off cost model that covered all systems. GNRA also wanted a system that could be easily installed and operated. In addition, the solution had to prevent users downloading viruses and certain types of attachment in junk mail.
Solution
With the help of Network Systems Solutions, GNRA selected credativ’s Open Security Filter to prevent spam and protect the organisation from web related attacks. GNRA was impressed by the company’s extensive experience in the Open Source sector and its flexible pricing policy. Additionally, as credativ’s solutions are based on Open Source software, there was no added cost for software updates or keeping spam and virus signatures up to date.
In September 2007, the Open Security Filter was deployed – it provided a spam filter, virus filter and firewall customised for GNRA's requirements. credativ's team was able to seamlessly integrate the system into the existing network infrastructure without requiring any downtime.
The Open Security Filter is based on tried and tested standard open source components, including SpamAssasin, ClamAV and Postfix. The Open Security Filter operated seamlessly with GNRA’s existing Windows infrastructure by filtering incoming email before it was forwarded on to the Exchange mail server. In addition, a transparent proxy ensured that all web traffic was scanned for viruses and malware without needing configuration changes to be made on all desktops.
The spam filtering component of the Open Security Filter is highly effective because it uses a combination of techniques to achieve high success rates. The grey listing stage puts up a road block to all but the most persistent of spammers, while the rule based filtering performs hundreds of checks against the mail contents, looking for techniques known to be used by spammers, using a set of rules continually updated by the Open Source community.
GNRA found that the combination of these techniques together with the virus filtering component very accurately eliminated the vast majority of unwanted mail. Messages classified as spam or containing blocked attachments were marked and forwarded to a quarantine area managed by the IT department using a web browser, allowing them to retain full control over filtered messages.
The Open Security Filter also contains a firewall module, using packet filter inspection to provide the highest security for all GNRA’s connections to and from the internet without compromising its strict security requirements.
Results
Overnight, staff noticed a large drop in spam: spam mail was reduced significantly across all the GNRA sites, which meant that GNRA was no longer bombarded by spam mail and levels of efficiency were once again restored. In the last month, for instance, of 8,200 emails received, only 5% of them were actually genuine emails.
Julie Keane, IT Manager, from GNRA, said, “We were delighted with the simplicity and effectiveness of credativ’s Open Security Filter solution, which we quickly set up to cover our whole mail domain. It is easy for us to skim through the quarantined emails on a regular basis, rather than having our inboxes bombarded by them.”
“Moreover the solution we purchased from credativ kept us abreast of latest internet threats and included access to their support team, which was indispensable and gave our organisation the reassurance it needed.”
Future plans
Following the success of the Open Security Filter, credativ has recently installed Nagios, which provides active monitoring of all devices on the network. This allows GNRA to pro-actively monitor all office and network connectivity centrally, ensuring that the IT department is alerted to any problems with the GNRA systems.
The Open Security Filter offers an additional option for GNRA as it can be implemented in a wide variety of configurations from a single machine up to clusters with throughput of hundreds of thousands of mails per minute.
About credativ
credativ Limited is an independent consulting and service company situated in Rugby. credativ has specialised in the planning and implementation of professional solutions through the use of free software since 1999 in Germany and in the UK since 2004.
credativ has operated the Open Source Support Center (OSSC) in Germany since 2006, offering professional 24x7 business support for many open source projects. credativ has 43 employees across its offices in the UK, Germany and Canada.
For more information
Chris Halls, credativ
Telephone: +44 (0)1788 298150
E-Mail: info@credativ.co.uk
Website: www.credativ.co.uk
Ranbir Sahota, Vitis PR
Telephone: +44 (0)121 2428048
E-Mail: ranbir@vitispr.com
