Email Protection

Email has for many years been the primary source of malware infestation entering a personal computer.

Viruses and Worms: These malignant entities, though almost as prevalent as Spam, are infinitely worse. viruses and worms can take over your computer, send your private information to attackers, destroy your hard drive, bring your computer to a stand still, or disrupt productivity in general. They are a threat to your privacy and make you suspicious of legitimate email.

Phishing is an e-mail fraud method in which the perpetrator sends out legitimate-looking email in an attempt to gather personal and financial information from recipients. Typically, the messages appear to come from well known and trustworthy Web sites. Web sites that are frequently spoofed by phishers include PayPal, eBay, MSN, and Yahoo. Recently AIB Bank customers have been exhaustively targeted. A phishing expedition, like the fishing expedition it's named for, is a speculative venture: the phisher puts the lure hoping to fool at least a few of the prey that encounter the bait.

Phishers use a number of different social engineering and e-mail spoofing ploys to try to trick their victims. In one fairly typical case before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), a 17-year-old male sent out messages purporting to be from America Online that said there had been a billing problem with recipients' AOL accounts. The perpetrator's e-mail used AOL logos and contained legitimate links. If recipients clicked on the "AOL Billing Center" link, however, they were taken to a spoofed AOL Web page that asked for personal information, including credit card numbers, personal identification numbers (PINs), social security numbers, banking numbers, and passwords. This information was used for identity theft.

The seamless integrated combination of ReassureMe.com’s Dynamic Web Filtering service and Mail Anti-virus can identify the vast majority of these threats and keep you protected from exposure.

Mail Anti-Virus from Kaspersky is part of ReassureMe.com’s comprehensive security suite, preventing incoming and outgoing email from transferring dangerous objects. It starts running when the operating system boots up, stays active in your system memory, and scans all email on protocols POP3, SMTP, IMAP, MAPI1 and NNTP, as well as encryption for POP3 and IMAP (SSL).

The default setup for Mail Anti-Virus is as follows:

1. Mail Anti-Virus intercepts each email received or sent by the user.
2. The email is broken down into its parts: email headers, its body, and attachments.
3. The body and attachments of the email (including OLE attachments) are scanned for dangerous objects. Malicious objects are detected using the threat signatures included in the program, and with the heuristic algorithm. The signatures contain descriptions of all the malicious programs known to date and methods for neutralizing them. The heuristic algorithm can detect new viruses that have not yet been entered in the threat signatures.
4. After the virus scan, you have the following available courses of action:
   • If the body or attachments of the email contain malicious code, Mail Anti-Virus will block the email, place a copy of the infected object in Backup, and try to disinfect the object. If the email is successfully disinfected, it becomes available to the user again. If not, the infected object in the email is deleted. After the virus scan, special text is inserted in the subject line of the email stating that the email has been processed by Kaspersky Internet Security.
   • If code is detected in the body or an attachment that appears to be, but is not definitely. malicious, the suspicious part of the email is sent to Quarantine.
   • If no malicious code is discovered in the email, it is immediately made available again to the user.

A special plug-in is provided for Microsoft Office Outlook that can configure email scans more exactly.

When working with other email programs, including Microsoft Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird, Eudora, Incredimail, Mail Anti-Virus scans email on SMTP, POP3, IMAP, MAPI, and NNTP protocols.