ExchangeDefender

ExchangeDefender discusses latest new releases for mid year 2021.

This summer has been hot for ExchangeDefender, like really hot. Yes, we do live in sunny Orlando, but we’re raving about our newest releases. We have been focusing on making processes easier for both our partners and our clients. “Keep it simple, stupid.”, has been our motto and we hope that our new releases are a reflection of that mantra. The uncertainty and added stress that the pandemic has caused, is what inspired us to look inside of our company, how we offer our services, and support.

We created a Desktop SPAM manager.

To be fair, we created a desktop application to manage your SPAM about ten years ago. We retired it, and decided that we needed to design a new and improved management system. The ExchangeDefender Desktop SPAM Manager is a multi-platform app that works well with Windows, Mac, and Linux. It is designed to provide users SPAM notifications. The manager lets you know when there is SPAM waiting, and allows users a secure way to access, read, reply, and forward messages. Interested in getting desktop notifications? Please open a ticket at https://support.exchangedefender.com, and we’ll send you a link!

We added Starter kits to our Marketing Collateral.

Did you know that we have a special section on our website for Marketing collateral? (www.exchangedefender.com/marketing) This page features a collection of sales support tools to help our partners sell ExchangeDefender services. We recently designed Starter Kits that provide useful information on our solutions. Whether you are a new partner, or a veteran – Starter Kits contain valuable material that can be shared with prospective clients. If you are an active partner, marketing collateral is available to you for free. You can even get your sales documentation branded with your logo. Simply visit the Marketing page, and submit your request.

We were featured on CBS, FOX, and NBC news.

Recently, ExchangeDefender was showcased on several U.S news outlets for the surge of new partnerships we are experiencing. We believe that the rise of popularity for our partner program has been due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Managed Service Providers, like most other businesses, are searching for ways to lower their costs, and boost their service offerings. Our partner program is free, and has always been free with the confidence that our clients would be able to focus on building their business. ExchangeDefender hopes to build meaningful relationships with MSPs who are seeking to build their business, while keeping IT costs down. To read more about our latest news coverage, please click here.

Yes – it’s true! ExchangeDefender has recently been featured on several U.S news outlets on the surge of new partners we’ve been experiencing since the covid-19 pandemic. Discover what was showcased below, and to experience the actual news coverage, please click here.

Cybersecurity firm, ExchangeDefender gets surge of new partners

Managed Service Providers seek to lower costs, and broaden IT service offerings

ORLANDO, FLORIDA, UNITED STATES, July 14, 2021 /EINPresswire.com/ — Orlando-based cybersecurity firm, ExchangeDefender has been experiencing a surge of new partnerships with Managed Service Providers (MSPs) across the United States. The security company has been servicing clients via channel partners for 22 years, and currently empowers 3,000+ partners worldwide. The ExchangeDefender partner program is unique in the competitive IT industry because it is absolutely free – there are no sign-up fees, or licensing fees for qualifying MSPs.

The rapid increase of MSPs comes as a result of the firm’s no-money down partner program that boasts award-winning cloud technologies in security, compliance, and business continuity. Managed service providers are able to apply for the partner program within minutes, get approved within 24 hours, and get full access to ExchangeDefender solutions – all with no upfront costs required.

“We knew that getting back to normal business was going to be extremely challenging after COVID, and we wanted ExchangeDefender to be the affordable option for MSPs to be able to lower their costs, while maintaining high quality IT solutions for their clients.” Vlad Mazek, ExchangeDefender CEO

Post-pandemic will prove to be difficult for businesses to regain traction, and profitability. We hope to build meaningful partnerships with MSPs who are looking to grow their business, while minimizing unnecessary IT costs that they normally incur with much larger providers.

About ExchangeDefender

ExchangeDefender is a cybersecurity company headquartered in Orlando, Florida. We specialize in email security, compliance, and business continuity solutions. ExchangeDefender has been providing IT solutions via managed service providers around the world since 1998.


For more information on ExchangeDefender, or to join the ExchangeDefender partner program, please visit our website to apply now!

ExchangeDefender has been providing email security, compliance, and business continuity solutions via Managed Service Providers since 1998. We believe in offering our partners exciting opportunities to build their MSP businesses with IT solutions that are profitable, flexible, and custom to fit their client’s needs.

Build an award-winning service portfolio with no upfront costs.

ExchangeDefender’s cloud technologies are distributed exclusively through our partner channel. Our commitment to your success is at the core of all we do. Joining us means you’ll be able to offer the following IT services instantly:

Advanced Email Security

ExchangeDefender PRO is a multi-layered security suite that protects users against SPAM, viruses, malware, phishing attacks, and more. The email security solution is compatible with all major email service providers – including Office 365, on-premise Exchange, and G-Suite for Business.

Data Encryption

ExchangeDefender Corporate Encryption enables users to send and receive encrypted messages by email, url, or sms. It is easy for organizations to quickly adopt, and also includes advanced real-time reporting with analytics.

Email Archiving and Compliance

ExchangeDefender Compliance Archive provides long-term email archiving, with unlimited tamper-proof encrypted storage. It includes powerful eDiscovery search, and helps organizations achieve email compliance with regulatory requirements established by IRS, FINRA, HIPAA, SOX and SEC.

Email Outage Protection

Yes, that’s right – say goodbye to email outages. Plus, how many other service providers do you know that offer this type of email continuity solution? ExchangeDefender Live Archive enables users to send and receive email during service outages from Outlook and Gmail.

File Sharing with Unlimited Storage

ExchangeDefender Web File Server is a professional file sharing software that offers secure sharing, and management of information. Web file sharing makes it easy for teams to share documents without having to rely on email, or old file servers. Provide your clients with the oversight and security of their most precious asset, their data – for just a few dollars.

Managed Email Hosting

ExchangeDefender empowers our partners to offer a secure full-service email hosting solution using the latest Hosted Exchange. Partners are able to provide clients peace of mind with professional email that is managed, supported, and secured by email experts.


Become an ExchangeDefender partner today!

Membership is free, you can cancel at any time. Enjoy full access to all of our solutions within minutes after being approved! APPLY NOW

We have been working on something cool based on the feedback from our clients. It’s a multi-platform app (Windows, Mac, Linux) that reminds you to check your SPAM, and when you do the message is just one click away – making it just as productive as Outlook & Outlook Web App.

It’s also a lot more secure.

Our portal remains the #1 way clients interact with ExchangeDefender at https://admin.exchangedefender.com. Most people already have it bookmarked. But for those that need a little extra push, a reminder (every 5/15/30/60 minutes) that there is SPAM waiting, a desktop notification, a secure way to access, read/reply/forward/delete the message – for you we have the ExchangeDefender SPAM Manager app:

ExchangeDefender SPAM Manager App

If you have users relying on the legacy ExchangeDefender Quarantine Email Reports, this is it’s new secure version.

We are currently wrapping up beta testing the app across all three platforms, if you’d like to take a look please open a ticket at https://support.exchangedefender.com and we’ll send you the link!

ExchangeDefender is pleased to announce the launch of Advanced Features and Policies, available to all our clients at https://admin.exchangedefender.com. These advanced features are meant to help sophisticated IT personnel establish policies for unique business case scenarios, and better protect their clients from email threats.

Advanced Features & Policies features are available on the Domain Admin section of our administrative portal at https://admin.exchangedefender.com. All features are disabled by default, due to their complexity, and must be enabled by the Domain Admin.

ExchangeDefender Advanced Features & Policies

Note about support: ExchangeDefender technical support is available to assist with these features 24/7/365 at https://support.ExchangeDefender.com. We are always happy to help point our clients in the right direction when considering these features. We do not provide troubleshooting or policy analysis for these features, however, as many of these features will by design enable ExchangeDefender to override established IT security best practices. We don’t recommend them, we do not support them, but as always we will attempt to help out and secure the client.

Features at a glance:

Infected Attachments – This policy enables Domain Administrators to allow users direct access to infected or blocked email attachments.

Charset Blocking – This policy enables Domain Administrators to block emails with specific character sets from reaching the Inbox.

Bulk Mailer Policy – This policy enables Domain Administrators to override ExchangeDefender scanning for top 10 mass mailing networks (AmazonSES, MailChimp, Sendgrid, etc)

Display Name Block – This policy enables Domain Administrators to block messages with specific sender  names from reaching Inbox.

Secure Web Form – This policy enables ExchangeDefender Encryption clients to receive secure/encrypted messages from third parties.

All of these features were developed with the help of our partners and clients who were experiencing unique issues that ExchangeDefender and other cybersecurity solutions/devices do not address. The hackers are advancing faster than IT can cope and we hope some of these features are as helpful to you as they were to other clients of ours that just needed to “make things work” and ExchangeDefender is always easy to reach.

As we continue to build ExchangeDefender we anticipate to introduce more Advanced Settings that would enable Domain Administrators to build a more powerful security wrapper around their email experience. To get more information about these features please watch our last webinar (available at https://support.ExchangeDefender.com) where our CEO explains the motivation and implementation scenarios.

ExchangeDefender is proud to announce the successful rollout of the first phase of our OAUTH implementation across three of our major products: ExchangeDefender Mail Security (Admin Portal), Encryption and WebShare. Originally, our rollout was planned to be a massive shotgun change across all services which would have required users to reset their passwords, but users had to be aware of their current password. In December, we started to log and analyze the entry points users took into the application and found that a majority of users relied on “one-click” login methods like quarantine reports to access their portal and would then jump to other services like Encryption via the “quick links.” Armed with the aggregated analysis, we realized our previous deployment strategy would unfortunately lead to many users being unable to access their services as many users were never aware of their password, thus putting an additional strain on our partners. However, we also know that the current security method was not sustainable for the future.

Enter: Deployment 2.0.

We knew our login system had to be smarter, safer, but also flexible. We knew we needed to rethink a lot of our auxiliary entry points (like quarantine reports) as well as our main entry points to work together in tandem, instead of hard cutovers or independent, one off operations. For example, we needed to continue to allow the legacy password hashing style to be accepted during login, but in-line upgraded to our new hashing algorithm. There were a lot of technical difficulties to overcome as each product maintained its own login page (which many users would save in their browser credential store) and in some instances, had additional security features that do not exist in other products (such as IP restrictions and 2FA in admin, but not encryption or Webshare).

Even more complicated than individual service login logic, some services maintained a list of users who are external entities to the end user’s organization (think Webshare or encryption recipients), and in most cases, these external recipients aren’t in the ExchangeDefender eco system. Ultimately, we decided to allow ExchangeDefender users to continue using each service’s independent login screens for a few weeks before disabling the legacy functionality and hinting to users to click the OAUTH login button “Login with ExchangeDefender” (or even “Login with Google” or “Login with Microsoft” more details below).

Originally, our plan involved redirecting all users to the new login server, which unfortunately would be the Achilles heal of those users who relied on their browser credential store. Ultimately, we landed on a hybrid approach, using the flexibility of using different OAUTH grant styles depending on the application.

The Deployment Timeline

Feb 19th: Activate the new login system for Encryption and Webshare

Feb 21st: Activate the new login system for Admin

Feb 26th: Activate the new centralized navigation headers

Feb 27th: Activate “Login with ExchangeDefender/Google/Microsoft” button to Admin, Encryption and Webshare. Add warning notification to users about the incoming login changes.

Mar 6th: Disable legacy password grant from services, enforce “Login with ExchangeDefender” when a user attempts to login with a username and password on each services page.

Throughout the remaining quarters of 2021, we will continue to integrate the rest of our services into the new login system, including support.ExchangeDefender.com, Compliance Archive, LiveArchive. Time permitted, we also plan on releasing a few tools to improve end user experience such as our Outlook/OWA plugin, built from the ground up to manage quarantine and user whitelists.

New Features to Expect

1 – Integration with Google and Microsoft OAUTH: Users are now able to utilize Google and/or Microsoft as their login provider. Authenticated users will now see buttons to link their Google or Microsoft identity to their ExchangeDefender account. Once linked, users can utilize the “Login with Google” or “Login with Microsoft” buttons instead of inputting their ExchangeDefender credentials to login.

2 – Improved 2FA integration: Users are now able to integrate 2FA applications like Google Authenticator or Authy. To setup 2FA users should login to admin.exchangedefender.com and navigate to the Settings for their account. Please keep in mind that the enforcement of 2FA logins (when enabled by the user) will come with the March 6th deployment. We strongly encourage users to set up 2FA before the full activation of our new login system.

3 – Trusted Devices: Coupled with 2FA, users can elect to mark a device they’re logging in with as a trusted device. Once a device is marked trusted, subsequent logins using the same device will not be prompted for 2FA again for 3 months.

4 – Improved Remember Me: On our login server we improved the remember me functionality to allow users to remain authenticated for 7 days if selected during login.

5 – Login to one, access to all: Users who now login to admin, encryption or webshare will inherently be authenticated to all other services using the new login method. This list will grow as we continue integrating services into the new login system.

6 – Centralized Navigation: Users will see a consistent navigation system across all products utilizing the new login system. More importantly, navigation to other products is streamlined and consistent.

7 – External Integrations: While redesigning the login system, we also elected to start centralizing API endpoints in anticipation of allowing partners and external providers to design their own tools and solutions, backed by ExchangeDefender.

There are tons of Antivirus software to choose from and finding the right solution for your business can be complicated.  ExchangeDefender can help in assisting SMBs to make the right decision. 

What makes a good Antivirus?

Any Anti-virus will do just that, to some degree, that is to fights viruses and other malicious software.  Maintaining your personal identification and safeguarding your privacy goes well beyond standard virus protection.  SMB’s must understand the difference between an average antivirus protection and outstanding antivirus protection. Don’t rely on just the antivirus that’s built-in to your computer applications.

The difference between good and GREAT

What makes a great Antivirus? A multithread and multi-layered protection approach scanning incoming data.   Remember extra, matters – especially if they are within budget.

A few must-haves when selecting Antivirus protection:

  1. Real-time Protection against viruses, trojans, malware, spyware, and adware.
  2. Cloud based, User control, Firewall protection
  3. An Antivirus that works well with others, i.e., MaC, iPhone, and Android
  4. Attachment blocking and attachment policy management
  5. Stops identity theft by blocking phishing attempts

This is where ExchangeDefender comes in with our top-selling advanced security suite known as ExchangeDefender PRO. ExchangeDefender possesses enterprise-grade email security suite offering multi-level protection against email-borne attacks. It not only provides exceptional virus protection, but also, phishing, spoofing, attachment blocking, Fraud prevention and so much more.

Our commercial antivirus engines use up to six antivirus engines to scan each incoming message

Cyber attacks continue to rise in 2021

Cyberattacks are here to stay and data breaches are on the rise as we come into the new year, affecting business owners with financial loss, brand damage, and legal ramifications.  It is imperative for businesses of all sizes to prevent data breaches.  ExchangeDefender’s high Throttled Malware & Trojan Control – has a built-in identification system that tracks the message & attachment MD5 checksums and responds by temporarily delaying messages that match the bulk-mail criteria. 

Malware Attachment Filtering & Sanitation is a must – The days of text-only SPAM are long gone. Today SPAM is distributed as a PDF, zip file, image, even an audio file! At the same time, we use our email as more of a file sharing mechanism than a communications platform. Subsequently, it is essential to understand the attachment type and what type of a threat it poses. ExchangeDefender analyzes attachments on multiple layers, using checks for file names, file types, MIME headers and archives to properly protect you from all dangerous content. 

From a business perspective, your brand reputation could be on the line, a solid Anti-virus software service would prove essential to protect your company’s, files, systems, and sensitive data. 

To learn more about ExchangeDefender’s advanced email security suite,
please click here.

ExchangeDefender security solutions experienced a burst in demand that has not let up, and neither has our development output. I’ve been involved in the strategy and our roadmap more than I’ve been in several years and I wanted to give you an informal update on some of our awesome projects and Q4 progress before we turn our attention to 2021. Hopefully we can help you.

Encryption

Encryption has been an undisputed heavyweight champion of sales in 2020 and we’ve heavily invested into the service that is now being used by our clients to secure everything from email stock trade notifications to doctor office sms/txt delivery of lab results. The ability to sell this product a-la-carte without ExchangeDefender (or MX/DNS changes) has significantly expanded our market and reach, while the ability to encrypt and distribute messages via web and sms/txt to mobile devices has opened up the application and use case scenarios exponentially. The demand for the product has not slowed down, and we’re already working on the 3rd update to this service in a year.

The bad news is that due to the demand we’ll stop partner training on December 1st, and Encryption sales will officially stop for 2020 on December 11th (expected to resume in late January 2021). We have a very large enterprise and government presence where most of the contracts, deployment, and projects happen in late December (and with Covid / office / travel restrictions our schedule is already packed).

XD Updates

We are making significant upgrades to our core ExchangeDefender features, and most of them are focused around productivity and management efficiency. For example, we’re starting our ExchangeDefender Outlook/OWA Addin beta later this month. We’re simplifying the way for you to implement and manage DKIM, SPF, and DMARC. We’re launching some other exciting features as an addon pack, which should help many organizations that need better controls to police notifications, confirmations, spear phishing attempts, and full transport rules. Where we’re in highest demand at ExchangeDefender is professional email services, where we’re brought in to assist with a specific email problem. Over the past year we’ve been hired to run mail audits, security audits, insurance company hired us to double-check in house IT, we’ve built several SMS/txt/email gateways, and almost on the hourly basis: security protocol implementations. It’s getting to the point that business email delivery and issue troubleshooting is a full time job. The future of cybersecurity looks bright!

Exchange Essentials

Because business is ultimately about making money, we’ve been pressed to return the Exchange Essentials service. Listen, I understand it, budgets are going to be tougher in 2021 and everyone is going to need an affordable but secure Exchange experience. Even if cuts aren’t crucial, for some organizations it makes sense to spend IT budgets elsewhere other than a $15 mailbox (most people these days spend their time in Outlook on their phone than on the desktop)

We’re bringing Exchange Essentials back at $4.99 for a limited time.

P.S. This is gonna sell out by Christmas, so if you have an opportunity and need us to hold some seats please call us at 877-546-0316, and let us know.

Wrkoo

We decided to give Wrkoo Startup away for free with no limits when we were first looking to shut down our offices in March — we knew small businesses were not prepared for an extended “work from home” and that keeping everyone informed was on every managers mind. We gave Wrkoo away for free to everyone that worked with our partners, everyone that had ExchangeDefender, and aggressively promoted it here in Orlando because we wanted to help our community. We are truly all in this together because small businesses depend on each other. This is a rather expensive marketing write-off, but we’ve pledged to keep it free through at least one quarter after the USA gets vaccines.

Through this time we’ve heard from people who are using Wrkoo to provide customer service, to send out invoices, to track time, to manage entire projects, we have a translation service that runs on it, and a business vertical of every kind. And with ExchangeDefender we keep on connecting business productivity with the way people actually work and communicate when they need to get stuff done. We couldn’t be happier to have been a part in someone getting their business together in the cloud. Throughout all this mess, Wrkoo is the way we keep everyone accountable and on the same page. I know it can do the same for your business, or recommend it to a friend.


The restructure of the encryption portal was driven solely to enhance the user experience.  The ExchangeDefender Encryption Portal gives users central access to all encryption messages, contacts, advanced encryption options groups, SMS, URL as well as a full audit log. All available from a secure site, available via desktop and mobile.

Let’s take a look at what’s new:

For Contacts, we have made it easy to be more productive by saving contacts you often send messages to.

Click, Create New Contact and provide the name and email address. It is that simple.

Basic vs. High Security

Primarily High Security requires the recipient to create a profile to ensure the message is not compromised by a 3rd party. We strongly encourage the use of High Security. Basic Security also provides end-to-end encryption, but does not require the recipient to register with ExchangeDefender.

Advanced Options are located on the right hand side of your screen, these features were created to enhance the user experience and to offer more flexibility for the user.

  • Automatically destroy the message after # days.
  • Notify this user when the recipient reads this message
  • Password protect this message
  • Notify me when the recipient reads this message
  • Actions allowed for recipients: Allow Reply/Forward or to Print

Groups

ExchangeDefender Encryption also supports groups.  You can add contacts to a group by clicking on +Create New Group and providing information about your contacts.  At any time, you can also click on the + icon next to the group name to +Add more members or click on the red X button to remove from the group.

Send encrypted messages via URL (Website)

ExchangeDefender Encryption enables you to send encrypted messages to web sites and services while maintaining the security and custody of the message contents.

The system generates a short URL that can be copied and pasted into Slack, Teams, Facebook, social media, or any other web site. URL Encrypted Messages are the most popular features as it provides a secure authentication layer, automatically deletes contents, and provides tracking.  Simply type your subject, message, attach documents and click Send and a dialog box will pop up with the link to the message. You can copy and paste this link and everyone with the access to it.

Send encrypted messages via SMS

Send encrypted messages to mobile devices via SMS / text messages. This feature is highly sought after by doctors, attorneys and insurance personnel that are frequently interacting with clients that are on the move. “We’ll just text it to you” is an easy way to deliver a secure message via the recipient’s mobile phone number.

The recipient receives an SMS message with a link to the secure encrypted message.  They will click the link, the default web browser on the phone will go to the secure SSL-encrypted web site to show message contents.

Internationalization

ExchangeDefender encryption portal has adopted Internationalization by designing the portal to be adaptive to various regions without engineering changes.

Audit Log

Every action related to encryption is listed here and reflects what was done even after the messages are gone.


To learn more about ExchangeDefender Corporate Encryption, click here.

ExchangeDefender is a cloud-based email firewall, and as such we enforce client’s policies against the only email address that is trustworthy: the envelope from address.

Over the past few years there has been a significant increase in use of disposable email addresses (DEA), specifically among mass/bulk mailing operations such as SendGrid, AmazonSES, MailJet, SMTP2Go, SocketLabs, Postmark, Mandrill, Mailgun, MailChimp, ConstantContact, etc. These email addresses, also known as “dark mail” create a unique email address to serve as the official From: line, in an effort to track bounces and delivery problems. Every time you get an email from one of these mass mailing operations the address the message actually came from is unique and generated just for that email/campaign – so whitelisting/blacklisting such addresses can be a challenge for clients that do not use ExchangeDefender’s admin portal or quarantine reports (which detect BATS/DEA addresses and auto-suggest the domain or IP to create a policy).

Bulk mail operations are not just used for mass marketing mail, where companies large and small do not want to build out the infrastructure to deliver tons of email. They are used for notifications, alerts, and most legitimate junk mail that you get. Unfortunately, the same companies are abused in virtually the same way by hackers to deliver spear phishing content. Because the body/header From: address can be easily faked, hackers hide behind places such as SendGrid, AmazonSES. Because they are highly automated, there is relatively little in the way of policing on these networks: after all, they make money to deliver junk mail to you and have little incentive to keep SPAM and phishing content from being sent through their networks.

Over the years, we’ve taught countless MSPs and IT people the difference between the “envelope from” (routing address) and “header or body from” (fake, but friendly looking From address displayed in your email software like Gmail or Outlook). As our client base has changed over the years, we’ve decided to write up an intro-level explanation of the process and how to master it. You can find it here:

https://www.exchangedefender.com/docs/whitelist

We hope you can use it to better block or permit access to these operations. If you’d like our assistance with this process, please open a ticket at https://support.ExchangeDefender.com and remember to attach the .eml file and/or full headers which are required for troubleshooting.

For our pro subscribers, stay tuned. We’ve been hard at work on our antispam engine enhancements and we’ll have a friendlier way to manage this by Thanksgiving 2020.