Managing User Notifications
It’s no secret to anyone that’s been paying attention to this space that ExchangeDefender is getting a lot more user friendly – both in service and in design. We’ve been improving the way we communicate with our clients and our partners through efforts like embedded help, in-line training and support, real-time chat support, self service portals, NOC sites, etc
Next week we will launch a major feature in ExchangeDefender. It will address one of the biggest pain points in email security and it will give users a ton of control that will help close what is currently the biggest exploitable hole in email security: spear phishing. This will require us to give users a heads up about what they are about to see and training/documentation about how to use it to the fullest.
Which is where we have to make sure our partners are a part of the process too. During the webinar we’ll go over the details about how to insert branding and a message/note at https://admin.exchangedefender.com. This is generally not a big issue, since almost all of our partners would rather have us do more work for them than less, but if you’re really sensitive about this topic make sure you’re in the webinar to see what options you have and how to best leverage them for your own business purposes.
Looking forward to showing you all of this, and the redesigned ExchangeDefender Encryption product on June 6th at noon. https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/198414968804117507
ExchangeDefender Web File Server gets even cooler – 5 new features!
It’s been less than two weeks since we released the highly anticipated upgrade to ExchangeDefender WFS (Web File Server / Web File Sharing) file collaboration portal. The usage of the service spiked as a result of the webinar, but it has been increasing on a daily basis ever since – don’t worry, developers and IT noticed – so we’ve been cranking ever since. As usual “it would be cool if it could do ” and “I have a ton of clients that need this, can it do ?” and we’ve been working overtime at the expense of other projects to get this done correctly (it’s being developed concurrently with ExchangeDefender Encryption and some other cool stuff).
Anyhow, I wanted to take a moment to show you what we do with your feedback.
First, yes, the old UI was a little bit clunky and REALLY slow by modern standards. We’ve fixed that, but it required redesigning how we actually build the library and how you interact with it. Since the last update we have split file upload from library creation – with the idea that the person that starts the library may not be the one contributing or sharing most of the documents in it.
As you can tell, there are some new features in here – permissions and smarter email notifications to be specific. With notifications, we’ve introduced a mechanism to send you an email notice (and soon something much, much cooler) when someone downloads a file from your library, as well as a notification whenever a file is uploaded. If your document management practices haven’t changed since the last decade, you’ll probably love this.
File management, or “actual work” as we like to call it, is on the next screen and is far more interactive. You can now upload files up to 500Mb (system max will eventually be 4GB) and as long as you’ve got a decent Internet connection you’re set. Drag and drop works too.
Once you’ve got your libraries together, you can actually pick up to 3 favorites. Those will be pinned to the top of your dashboard so you can access them quickly:
Now this is where things get cool and leave old “file sharing” stuff in the dust. If you’re working with others, particularly if they are contractors or not in your organization, you’re getting notices via email. ExchangeDefender WFS supports that by default, enjoy making your Outlook even slower and less productive. I’ve got something better. See that panel on the right? It shows you recent activity. Yes, this means that once you log in you will be able to see which files got changed, which libraries you got added to, what happened. And you will be able to plow through all the files and libraries and catch up with everything within a minute.
Next we’re embedding even more chat/discussion/notes to it so you can say goodbye to having to compose or respond to emails entirely. The big idea is that organizations are always sharing files but they are either stuck with old technology or old restrictive (and often insecure) platforms to do so. Say hello to ExchangeDefender WFS. It doesn’t look to “Windows File Sharing” first, it looks at collaboration first. Cause that is what people do with documents – they work on them together – be it creative, administrative, processing, logistics – life revolves around getting data and distributing it – and we’re making sure you can do that as securely and as productively as possible while getting rid of the “traditional IT way of doing it”
Everything you see here is a result of user feedback. So please, as you use our products and services, if we can help you please tap the Feedback link that is on every page and help us build something awesome.
P.S. Oh by the way, WFS now also supports versioning and revision control/notes. You’re welcome! 🙂
Sharing files with ExchangeDefender WFS
ExchangeDefender launched the new release of Web File Server (WFS), formerly known as Web File Sharing. Our new release is more secure, more efficient, and delivers far more productivity through tons of new features. Today, I’m going to show you how to share a new library.
First, go to https://wfs.exchangedefender.com. Everything you send through this site is encrypted (as are backups, disks, passwords, etc).
Click on Libraries > Create New Library.
Pick a title, description and add a few email addresses of folks you’d like to share files with (or set up a group). You can also password protect the library (recommended) as well as setup automatic expiration if your corporate policy requires you to nuke any company files in the cloud after a certain amount of time.
Click on Create Library. Congratulations, your library is now online and your recipients will get an email (or two, if password protected) inviting them to share files.
Now it’s time to add files. Click on +Add files.. and select as many files as you wish by either selecting them with your mouse or hold Ctrl down as you click on them (for the moment the uploads are capped at 250Mb/file but you can upload as many files as you wish). Provide any comments you wish (to make it easier for folks to see what is what without having to download everything) and click on Start upload.
That’s all. Once the files have been uploaded everyone has access to them. Your clients can upload changes or new files (if permitted), and you can add more files to the library at any time. Works on the desktop as well as on any mobile device.
It’s that simple. For more info an in-depth explanation of all the options, please download the manual.
ExchangeDefender PTR & RBL Whitelisting
ExchangeDefender is opening a wider beta test of our whitelisting functionality, which allows IT Solution Providers to whitelist sender mail servers that have broken DNS (missing PTR, mismatched A/PTR records) and poor sender reputation (hosts listed on multiple RBL blacklists).
If you have a sender you would like to whitelist against these essential network tests, please open a ticket at support.ownwebnow.com with subject “Whitelist PTR/RBL: IP Address” and provide as much information in the ticket so we can accommodate this specific request. Only hard non-negotiable rejections to whitelist will be for unknown address space and dialup/consumer cable IP addresses (because due to their nature those are typically dynamically assigned address spaces that shouldn’t be relaying mail at all, they should be using their ISP mail server provided smarthost)
Requests will be reviewed and either approved (and enrolled) or rejected within 24 hours by our CSO.
Background: Inability to previously whitelist broken DNS and dynamic IP address space is rooted in our mission statement. We are here, beyond everything else, to help secure the email. We know our partners, IT Solution Providers, VARs, MSPs, etc do not have the skill set, the time to properly research underlying issues, enough data and statistical models to evaluate sender IP reputation, or even the incentive to discern how big of a security threat and compromise a specific IP address with broken DNS or poor reputation may pose to your client.
In fact, you pay us to worry about those things and keep your clients secure. But, sometimes clients like to think they know better than their technology experts, generally accepted security standards on the Internet, and ExchangeDefender. And the client is always right. But, when they get infected attachments, broadcast storm, password dumps, or other security compromises because they insisted on lowering their security – then ExchangeDefender is on the hook for securing them. And we don’t get to say “told you so” nor do we have any rapid means to fix the issue.
Since my retirement, all of those hard-line policies designed to keep clients safe beyond whatever “specific business case requirement” they may have, are slowly going away. Good news for the client, good news for the partners. Good news for us, because going forward we will start providing Email Security Engineering services – so when you get a security compromise or an usual issue and you’ve asked us to compromise your security – we will be able to address the issue on your behalf.
I choose to look at this as a positive – we will help our clients meet their business needs and get the mail they desperately need – and if something breaks we will be there to help assist with the cleanup (for a fee, of course). This, among many other service related things, is just the part of the ExchangeDefender being more responsive and service oriented when it comes to our clients demands as opposed to our expert opinion as a security policy.
ExchangeDefender’s AnythingDown.com – See How It Works!
As promised in the last webinar, we’re moving as aggressively as possible to make sure our partners have as flexible of a tool as we can imagine to communicate with clients in the event of an IT catastrophe. Or, in our case, to further increase transparency and collaboration with all our ExchangeDefender service providers so you can get better insight into our network and when we’re dealing with a lot. That said, I believe that the product/service is now production ready and we’ve already tied it up in our ExchangeDefender Enterprise product so you’ll know as we know. 🙂
Remember, ExchangeDefender’s AnythingDown.com , or https://yourserviceproviderid.xdnoc.com – is your own brandable, real-time alert system that covers ExchangeDefender managed resources as well as your own custom defined events.
Let’s go on a little tour, shall we?
First, here is the nearly-final look of the site. It will of course feature your logo, your contact information, and your own services but you can see that there is now a sign in section as well as nested posts – so when something is updated it’s done so in-line and can be read normally (as opposed to just seeing the latest update and not knowing what it’s about at all).
Sign in screen is for you, just provide your service provider ID and password and you’re in your own portal.
As for your users that want real-time updates via email or RSS/blog, we have a signup page (I know, I know, it’s idiotic but GDPR and EU have put this obstacle in place where we need contracts and disclosures about signing up for an email list).
Once you’ve signed in as the service provider, you will have access to manage and create new service advisories. Just click on the Add New button in the upper right corner. If you’re managing a larger NOC and have a ton of fires going on (you’re among friends, #respect) you can also search current open advisories and make sure you update the correct one.
New advisory posting is pretty flexible and gives you actually quite a bit of power to include images, links, and other multimedia. As network geeks we’re used to plain text, ASCII, 80 columns across black on white kind of alerts but in the 21st century with lots of things going on sometimes you can throw out a quick alert with a screenshot of what’s going on rather than trying to document every single detail (for example, a cloud of daily network/ISP outages as an explanation why things are moving slow or getting delayed or buffered)
And of course, you can update every service advisory.
As mentioned last month, ExchangeDefender XDNOC </a> service is all about helping us work better with the people that pay us to help protect their networks and users. I have some rather personal thoughts on that subject, which will be a matter of another post. However, when you design software and when you serve as the gatekeeper, your primary responsibility to the people you’re protecting and waking up to keep safe every day is not just to keep things going but also to keep everyone aware of what is going on to improve things – because hackers don’t take days off.
Anything down? We’re improving our NOC and communications!
When things malfunction at other companies, they blame vendors and equipment. When things malfunction at ExchangeDefender, we build products and services so we never have to deal with the problem in the first place. As a result of a DDoS attack last month, I am happy to introduce you to our new service that will improve one area in which we undoubtedly suck the most: communication.
Say hello to AnythingDown.com:
It’s an offsite NOC alert site that’s branded for you.
At ExchangeDefender we do a pretty amazing job communicating and working with our partners, it’s actually our #1 selling point, that you can come to our offices and data centers, you can work with our team and get things done. But when something breaks, that same business friendliness and accessibility is an achilles heel – clients swamp the phones demanding to be briefed on every detail, “Friends of Vlad” call every staff cell phone they can find, the staff that is there to help/coordinate/assist in technical work cannot efficiently correspond and inform every user particularly when things go down and everything isn’t working as it should.
This is where ExchangeDefender XDNOC (aka “AnythingDown.com”) helps.
It’s off site. Doesn’t rely on our networks at all.
It’s on it’s own name space. Not dependent on our DNS/registrars.
It’s branded. Your name, your image, your message.
That last bit is pretty important – we realize that our larger clients have many employees that have never heard of ExchangeDefender, ditto for our partners that don’t want to reveal ExchangeDefender is behind their branded email offering.
Not to worry, your site is already branded and you have your own Service Provider XDNOC: https://<yourExchangeDefenderSPId>.xdnoc.com
It’s yours, it’s yours for free, and we’re just getting started. For the next week or two, the site will host ExchangeDefender content only as we add in the mechanism for RSS subscriptions, linking, SMS/txt alerts, and email notifications.
But this is just the beginning. As an ExchangeDefender subscriber you will have access to this site to tweak it as necessary and to add your own NOC alerts. That’s right, we’re not just building this for ourselves, we see it as a role of central accountability for everyone that relies on our services and all the services you use to deliver a solution. We all want to keep the client happy and informed and this will help out a lot towards that goal.
Our expectation is also to have our proprietary monitoring and alert feeds published on AnythingDown.com going forward so you can see or anticipate the issues that our infrastructure is seeing even before there are tickets or human confirmation of the problems. For many that will be way, way, way too much data but we feel it’s better to present it and get more eyes on it than hide it and hope it’s handled through automation or our staff activity.
In closing, I hope this helps. I know outages and service interruptions or performance issues or networking issues all suck, nobody wants them. They come with the territory and everyone knows it – so it’s not about technology malfunctions, it’s about your communication about the IT work that is done to make it as flawless as possible. We thank you for your business and for your continued support of ExchangeDefender that makes stuff like this possible.
Network Upgrades at ExchangeDefender
Many IT professionals have gone through a lifecycle infrastructure upgrade – the all important cycle of improving the infrastructure as the vendors push down new features with ever increasing resource demands. We’ve been doing that since 1997. One thing that has changed in the past 20 years is the scope and magnitude of both attacks and the network demands to manage them all. We’ve done an excellent job keeping up with them all, with our last major outage (that lasted nearly 4 hours) back in 2011. We learned a lot that day – and rolled it up into our products and services that many of our partners have experienced. These days, with the cloud services, the game is completely different.
I hope you have a moment to join our WEBINAR next Thursday, April 11th, at noon
Register here: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5700720797827651073
It won’t be the usual rah-rah new features new stuff show. I will speak candidly about how we’ve managed to overcome and triumph in the “Cyber” security game and how we’re still always one step behind whatever 0-day attack vector comes down. I’ll be discussing (somewhat intimate) details about the performance issues, DNS issues, DC issues, subscription issues, 3rd party IP issues, and how all of these have become both an IT management issue and customer service nightmare. I truly hope you join us. I know your time is valuable and schedules get tight so if you can’t make it, the recording will be posted in our portal as usual.
What we learned last week – for the millionth time – is that communication in cases of issues is paramount. When things appear to go down, people panic. They require not just information but reassurance, confidence, and a plan required to address issues. For smaller companies, that’s a matter of just falling back to a cell phone – for larger ones (if it’s not already you, it definitely is something to consider for your clients) that is simply not an option and the volume of activity will easily and quickly overwhelm you. I used to see it every day – when issues come up for our partners, their clients call us.
We’ve made an overwhelming investment – not just in technology and features but manpower – that has fueled our growth for the last few years. I want to share, personally, exactly how we operate and how we’ve been able to both prioritize and execute some of the more impressive infrastructure enhancements and how they are going to be here to serve you for years when something happens.
And then I hope to offer you the same – as a token of our appreciation for your business and your loyalty through the years. Pretty excited, I hope you can join us.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO
ExchangeDefender
ATTN Partners: Currently Experiencing DDoS Attack (3/25/19)
We are currently experiencing a large scale DDoS attack on our network specifically our DNS servers.
Our team is working diligently to correct the issue, please stand by for more information – or give us a call (877-546-0316) if you need any assistance!
We will make sure to keep you updated via the ExchangeDefender blog, our facebook (@exchangedefender), and within the portal as access gets restored.
Thank you for your patience.
New Feature: ExchangeDefender Announcements
ExchangeDefender Announcements
As you’ve probably noticed, our feature development has really picked up in 2018 and we have an even more aggressive product roadmap for 2019. To help make sure everyone is on top of all the new features and that our partners (MSP/VAR) have the best possible way to keep all of our clients informed of the new features, we’re happy to announce the Announcements feature!
Starting in late February 2019, our service providers and CIOs alike will have the ability to post announcements that will be featured prominently on the ExchangeDefender admin login page, inside the user control panel, and in the domain/org control panel. As you can imagine, this feature has a lot of flexibility to help you efficiently target the right organizations and users.
Announcement Feature Highlights:
– Announcement title and announcement contents can include HTML and you can even insert a picture for each.
– You can set the announcement expiration date so that the announcement doesn’t show up after a certain date. This is great for sales promotions, webinar registrations, etc.
– You can scope the announcement: It can be global (for all of your domains) or it can be scoped down to a list of domains you choose. As most of our MSPs manage different kinds of organizations, one-size-fits-all announcements rarely work and this feature can help you solve that problem by targeting each organization specifically.
– I want to see this announcement too: If you’re in a larger organization you likely have personnel that is responsible for different departments or companies. Because announcements are visible on the login page of your portal as well as control panels for service provider, domain/org, and end users you have the ability to not show end user announcements to your IT and management staff.
– Include all users: You can even write specific announcements that are targeted at end users.
As ExchangeDefender gets bigger and as the complexity and service portfolio grows, we need to help our partners and CIOs communicate the new ExchangeDefender features more efficiently. Since you control your announcements it is up to you if you use it for ExchangeDefender related stuff or if you use it for your own promotion or if you delegate it to your companies to use it as another outlet to broadcast organization-specific but important news to everyone.
Most ExchangeDefender users interact with the service daily so you have a perfect (captive) spot to reach them about a product they are already interacting with – instead of having it burried in an email newsletter that they likely won’t read. This has been among the most demanded MSP features for years and we’re happy to deliver something with enough power and flexibility that will make both your tech/support people happy (so they can address possible support issues) as well as marketing/sales (so they can better target their message). You can only display up to two (2) announcements at a time though so the only bad news here is that you’ll have to prioritize.
UPDATE: ExchangeDefender Enterprise Security Features
To say that our security webinar went well is an understatement – partners actually loved it. It’s a strange and welcome departure from how my security and hacking conversations usually go (nobody ran away from me crying and screaming into their cell phone) and I cannot tell you how gratifying it felt to introduce security features and have people line up to offer them.
Frankly, it was time. The state of email (and email security) is unsustainable if we let the users and infrastructure we manage act like account security is an afterthought – that just leads to more compromised endpoints that just amplify the next attack that will be more sophisticated, harder to defend – AND – will eventually lead to increase in costs as more infrastructure is needed to protect users who want to act the same ways spammers do. We’ve put a smart lock on the door, it’s your choice whether you want to lock it.
That said – all these features are a part of the ExchangeDefender Enterprise which is designed for very large companies and government where organizational policies override any complaints and gripes end users may have with the security inconvenience. Which is exactly the opposite from the small businesses that MSPs tend to manage.
We get it. And we’re not giving up.
In the nearly two weeks that we’ve been rolling out the new security features to the MSP/SMB UI, we’ve noticed some severe pain points for our users that we’ve moved very aggressively to address and mitigate. Which is my commitment to you – we will keep on stepping up the security and we will find ways to mitigate some of the prompts, alerts, and notifications along the way if you don’t want your users to be aware of what is going on under the hood.
First up, if you’ve chosen to lock down ExchangeDefender admin panels to the restricted IP range you own, you now have the option to turn off email notices every time a login attempt is made from outside of this range.
We’re in progress of making additional changes and exceptions to the IP address restriction policy and removing it from the SPAM release process – so if your employees are mobile or working from home they will soon be able to release a legitimate message (false positive SPAM) from anywhere even with IP restrictions in place. They won’t be able to login to the control panel and make modifications or see other settings but they will be able to get to their email.
We hope this feature enhancement will reduce the amount of email notifications – you will still see them in your event logs.
Second, we have opened up our OTP/2FA infrastructure to the whole world.
Finally, the alerts on the clients dashboard. I am going to phrase this carefully as I’m not happy to announce this and will likely change it eventually: You can turn that alert off and stop users from being required to change their passwords very X days. Just set the value to 0. We will revisit this within 30 days but as a mitigation to any unwelcome support calls, yes 0 will just turn it off.
We’ve been working on the announcement and training features for quite some time now and we hope that they will make security implementation and support a problem for ExchangeDefender to handle, instead of burdening our partners with it. In an ideal world, those features would have launched first and we’d slowly trickle down ExchangeDefender Enterprise. Unfortunately, another 600+ million usernames, passwords and other PII has been leaked last week from some very popular sites and the odds that those users and passwords have the same credentials there as at ExchangeDefender are pretty good.
My point is, we are paid to protect and lock down your organizations communication and secrets, something we take extremely seriously. In order to protect all the data you trust us with, we have to lock things down. And as we do so, we will keep user experience front and center.
Thank you for trusting us with your data and thank you for your business.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO
ExchangeDefender