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