Being a consultant to the mining industry we often have to undertake additional training to remain certified and competent in all aspects of mining and mine safety.
Just this week I attended one such exercise over a two-day period and whilst the training itself was rigorous there were a few breaks to network and interact.
The trainer, a jovial 60-year old coal miner, was checking his email in-between the major breaks via his wireless broadband (although I doubt the 500mb limit would do him much good) and whilst he knew plenty about coal mining (he started when he was 15 in Scotland) one can only assume that he either couldn’t work the projector or didn’t care as his email was displayed on the classroom screen for all to see.
Whilst this is nothing new to see I did notice that just about every break that at least one or two SPAM messages came through. With all of today’s technology and tools a our disposal I would expect maybe one or two a week – but this was more like 12 a day.
Now over the years one gets to learn the tray icons that run in the lower right hand corner of Windows and it struck me that the trainer was running “protection” software from an industry heavyweight in the anti-virus space.
But it wasn’t working.
And that’s the risk with this kind of software. It started as an anti-virus software and when firewalls became the norm it adapted. Then spam started to bug everyone and it adapted too.
But it’s core skill is still in fighting viruses.
So all the while this software is doing more, scanning more, anticipating more and preventing more and its CPU and memory is more. Seriously I wonder who’s the virus here?!
And it was letting SPAM through.
This is the problem with this kind of software. It depends on so many factors. It depends on updating itself every day at some set interval. It depends on your PC’s ability to hold the spam and anti-virus databases and it depends on your Internet connection –- far too much.
Consider this: Before the anti-spam software can do it’s “magic” it has to download the email from your ISP or host. At that point it’s too late. You’ve already downloaded the spam and apart from eradicating the annoyance of reading it little else has been achieved.
If you use one of these “washer” programs and think you’re covered – think again. SPAM has evolved beyond the basic check of email headers.
It’s astonishing too that some ISP’s consider that a variable accuracy open-source anti-spam and anti-virus solution is good enough solution for your email.
And so the vicious cycle begins. The crowd that you fork-over money to decides that your money is only good enough for a mediocre anti-spam and anti-virus solution. So you fork over more money to another crowd that decides in order to protect you as well as it can on a best-effort basis that it needs to chew up all of your PC’s resources. To fix that you donate money to the coffers of PC manufacturers and so it goes on…
… and we’ve had enough of it …
… quite enough.
Whilst we do operate a hosting division within DigiTronix (namely DigiHost) it offers only business-grade hosting. And whilst we may use the same software offered at other hosting providers we install our copies on enterprise-grade servers of significantly higher quality and reliability than “entry-level” servers.
We install perimeter and core firewalls and re-enforce this with intrusion detection services – something overlooked by the cheap providers.
However there is one thing that we have done so differently that you may very well be surprised.
We’ve turned off all of our spam and anti-virus scanners. That’s right. We’ve turned them off.
They don’t work.
The best we’ve ever achieved was around 86% spam reduction and this after two years of “training” the filter. For the volume of mail we did it equated to around 120,000 spam messages slipping through every month – completely unacceptable.
Today we use a distributed cluster of “spam firewalls” as seen on the left manufacture by Barracuda Networks.
These appliances offer spam accuracy of 94% out of the box and with training creep as high as 99.4%.
Anti-virus, anti-spamming, anti-phishing, anti-spoofing and all the other anti’s are incorporated within this device.
Recently we have taken the decision to offer this excellent protection to customers outside of our network via our new jamspam service.
There is no software and nothing to install and or as little as 60c per email address per month you could have enterprise-grade protection.
For more information on this service please see http://www.jamspam.com.au