September Webinar: New ExchangeDefender Projects
Development and service improvement around ExchangeDefender is really in a different gear now and we have a huge webinar to discuss all the new stuff that you will start seeing in September:
– New Shockey Monkey Service Manager UI (for private portals)
– Exchange 2016 rollout for SMB clients
– Upgrades to IoT for CAN-SPAM tracking/issues
– Allowing threaded conversations in Web File Sharing
– Allowing file exchange through Corporate Encryption
– ExchangeDefender Pro UI changes
– and much more.
It’s a LOT of stuff with HUGE improvements all around so if you work with us you’ll really want to attend:
ExchangeDefender New Stuff Webinar
Wednesday, September 5th. Noon EST
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/1810967512151336450
Since February of 2017 we’ve been working on core infrastructure updates to address major weaknesses in the previous infrastructure model and have embraced rapid development, regulatory compliance requirements, different laws and regulations impacting our clients all over the world, and major needs our clients expressed that required development at a different scale. This again puts us (and you) ahead of the competition and we look forward to helping you gain more business.
Tune in!
ExchangeDefender and Mobile Device Security
Mobile Device Security
ExchangeDefender protects pretty much any device that has access to email – and a category most prone to email-borne security exploits are mobile devices. ExchangeDefender Pro and our Exchange hosting services can nearly eliminate an attack vector through malware detection, phishing attempt alerts and can help you wipe a device remotely without having physical access to it.
The number one way to get malicious content to a mobile device is still via email – it’s so easy to trick a user to click on a malicious link and on a mobile device it is far harder to tell if the sender is legitimate or spoofed. Hackers format messages in such a way that it’s easy to see legitimate links and accidentally click on malicious ones so ExchangeDefender is extremely useful in making sure any such dangerous content is stripped off in the cloud. Anyone can email any content they wish to your mobile device and with ExchangeDefender you are assured that even the most aggressive of 0 day exploits do not arrive in your users mailbox.
Phishing, or forging/deceiving an identity of a third party, is a popular way for hackers to get users to click on links that appear to be legitimate. It’s very easy to copy a look of an Amazon or bank email notification and get the user to click on the link that takes them to a forged web site to download malicious content. Unlike Malware protection, which removes dangerous content from the email, phishing protection deactivates links in email messages and highlights phishing attempts when links to third party sites do not match the domain name of the sender. If you were getting an email from jeff@amazon.com would he be including a link to http://1001smallbizscamsandfrauds-519.org? Our system will deactivate that link and keep your user safe from whatever is on the malicious site.
Remote Wipe & Device loss management
In the event that your users device is lost, users employment is terminated, you don’t have physical access to the device but need to wipe it for security reasons – you can start a remote device wipe through your Outlook Web App under Settings > Mail > Options > Mobile devices and selecting Wipe Device. Within moments the device will be wiped clean of any data, content and settings and this works for both iPhone and Android devices (tables and phones).
ExchangeDefender Pro offers users a VPN server to connect to in a secure manner no matter where they go. Public Wifi hotspots tend to have questionable security at best and can be used to compromise a device that is connecting blindly across the Internet. Connecting your phone automatically to a VPN can assure that email access (and all the confidential data in the email) can never be snooped on.
We are currently in beta with our mobile OTP/2FA applications which will further turn the mobile device into a part of your authentication so you don’t have to remember complex passwords at all. In the meantime, it’s important to let the users know what ExchangeDefender is currently capable of doing for them and to enable/configure those features so they are actively protecting every email user in your organization.
Managed Outbound Network Services
Beta Launch: Managed Outbound Network Services
ExchangeDefender is proud to announce the beta launch of our Managed Outbound Network Services – interjecting support, monitoring, and management of outbound mail delivery services. If you’ve ever had to deal with outbound delays, deferrals, rejections, SMTP channel errors, etc we will now have the ability to assist you with email delivery and facilitate problem resolution for outbound email delivery in realtime.
One of the biggest problems in troubleshooting outbound mail problems is that problems are noticed days later, and are generally resolved well before a ticket is opened. The same goes for abuse, sometimes a mail blast is caught only after hundreds of messages have been sent and domain/sender had their reputation damaged.
Tighter Restrictions Means Better Monitoring
Our new ExchangeDefender Managed Outbound Network Service involves tighter restrictions and better monitoring of email traffic by actual humans reviewing statistical models in realtime. This is not something that is possible through automation because it’s very difficult for computers to determine legitimate content from illegitimate or dangerous content. Sending patterns also change depending on the sender, time of day, day of the month, devices, etc. User may run a mail merge marketing campaign or invoice batch and send hundreds of messages in a very short period of time, blocking their access automatically would interrupt legitimate activity. By adding people to the mix, that can analyze the content and sending patterns we have the ability to stop outbound mail abuse the same way we do it on the inbound side.
“Considering that almost 30% of our support time is dedicated to outbound mail delivery inquiries,
we expect this new solution to reduce our partners and clients time significantly.”
-Vlad Mazek, CEO ExchangeDefender
The best part about the new service is that it will be free and will require no configuration or management on our clients or partners behalf. Any notices we may have to issue to end users will automatically carry our partners or clients logo and contact information and will be resolved in realtime. Historically, we know that 90% of the time our clients are not aware of an issue at all, and we hope that the new service will reduce ongoing support and technical troubleshooting struggle our partners have had to go through regarding email delivery. By catching the issue in realtime, we will also help our partners appear more proactive and able to protect their clients better during 0-day infections and outbreaks. Additionally, we will be able to minimize the damage that a single careless user or hacker can cause an entire organization by stopping an outbreak at the source.
We will be writing more about this service in August and the first beta clients will be onboarded during the 2nd week of August – if you are interested in participating please send an email to beta@ownwebnow.com and let us know!
So You Think GDPR Doesn’t Apply to You?
That Four Letter Monster: GDPR
We know – you’re tired about hearing about GDPR – and you’ve probably received a billion emails about it from marketers all over the world urging you to “confirm” your subscription. As our CEO recently posted on Facebook:
“There were two kinds of IT people this week on Facebook – those that whined about
GDPR and those that got richer as a result of it.”
You can hear more of Vlad’s unfiltered thoughts on GDPR in the Game Changer webinar held earlier this month, but needless to say the GDPR is something that is here to stay and with every public privacy breach the notion of government regulation worldwide is going to start with GDPR as the foundation.
What this means for you – regardless of whether you’re the CIO or an MSP partner – is that client data privacy, disclosure, search, and reports will start consuming more of your time.
Do you currently have a solution in place that can quickly tell you what sort of data you have on your clients? Beyond your CRM.
What about the invoices that get emailed out with account numbers and addresses?
What about any contracts or agreements that got emailed back and forth?
I think you see where we are going with this: you need to prepare your IT for eDiscovery even if you don’t have urgent, current, and pressing reason to do so. Penalties for exposing financial data are extreme and the more the world gets used to privacy disclosure and where client data may be stored the more requests and inquiries you will start seeing. Businesses (aka “people with money”) are the low hanging fruit that will be sued first.
This is by no means a new trend: We have been selling Compliance Archive and Corporate Encryption for years but GDPR has really put the demand for these products into a new gear. For our partners, this has significantly increased both sales and service requests that are a giant opportunity for many to be ahead of the curve and regulatory changes worldwide.
Get ready for it today and call us – we have the products, the service, documentation, marketing collateral and back office legal support –
all you need to do is present it to the client and can help you do the rest.
ExchangeDefender IoT Email Relay Service
The Internet of Things
ExchangeDefender IoT has concluded it’s beta period and we’re thrilled to announce that the system will go into production this week. We have blogged about this previously and the demand for this service really surprised us – so we’re rolling with the production and adding all the new features into the beta product as the applications for this service are quite extensive. To sum it up:
ExchangeDefender’s IoT Email Relay Service
ExchangeDefender IoT Email Relay Service is a custom email smarthost (outbound relay) designed specifically for Internet of Things devices and services to securely dispatch realtime email alerts. Feature-wise:
– XD IoT Relay assigns every device has it’s own account/credentials so if one device is compromised the email capabilities of others aren’t impacted.
– XD IoT Relay is secure permitting traffic only via TLS/SSL SMTP protocol to assure security credentials cannot be sniffed on the network.
– XD IoT Relay allows dynamic IP ranges, allowing for cell/4G/LTE devices and sensors with remote/unsecure network connectivity to relay alerts.
– XD IoT Relay is compatible with every device that can send out email via SMTP/SSL (should be all of them) and is backed by our support and automated throttle management (in the event of an infection)
New feature is available in the ExchangeDefender admin portal under Domain Admin > Accounts > IoT Accounts.
Simply add a new account for each device you wish to have relay rights for (they are free for now) and configure your device to relay through outbound-auth.exchangedefender.com. Our service is globally redundant (no single point of failure) and is under our SPF/DMARC announced range.
We will be blogging more about this feature as we develop it and get a better handle of how it’s used but the feedback so far has been very positive and constructive. The biggest surprise (read: shock) is the level of unreliability of some of these devices/sensors and their rather infant API/app development – but they all know how to send email so many of our partners are looking to us to help fill the void between these devices/sensors going dark/offline and production email notification service. Many of our partners also looked to use this for printers, blogs, contact forms and a seemingly endless set of services that a remote ISP should be providing but they don’t – so when it comes to business and email people come to ExchangeDefender.
P.S. If you’d like to hear more about this feature and all the other new stuff we have set for ExchangeDefender in 2018, please download the webinar where we go into the details of how/why/what that might give you a broader perspective on how to position, sell, and implement these new features. Please click here to download the webinar.
Three Simple Ways To Begin Regulatory Compliance Archiving
Have you been putting off offering or relying on Compliance Archiving to meet regulatory compliance requirements? If so, you’re among friends as most businesses tend to view it as a form of a backup until they receive a letter from a law firm. Recently we published a quick and informal techie-free post about business continuity and we wanted to do the same for archiving because the #1 thing that will keep you out of trouble is making sure your entire organization is on the same page.
With that in mind, here are three steps that your organization needs to follow to get started with Compliance Archiving:
Step 1: Understand how your organization communicates
If you only knew what everyone did and what they had access to, things like security and compliance would be a non-issue. In the real world, organizations have a revolving door of staff, vendors, clients, laws, and projects that is constantly spinning. The notion that you can get something to manage it all, held together by IT staff and automation, is nothing short of a fantasy. Or rather, a nightmare, because you’ll get in trouble over one thing that was missed and went wrong not a million things that went right.
Our Compliance Archiving touches every message in your organization: doesn’t matter if it’s a message you sent to a client, a message you received from a vendor, or an interoffice email you sent to a coworker – we get them all. The important thing in step one is identifying the people and making sure that the way you communicate is set in stone: “We communicate with everyone through @ownwebnow.com email addresses, every ticket, every update, every inquiry, every quote, every bill pay – everything either comes from or is cc’d to an @ownwebnow.com address.”
Step 2: Get a grip on your devices, apps, and processes
Convenience is the enemy of order. And if you’re going to run a business, you cannot have everyone do exactly what they want to do. Yes, Subway will make your sandwich any way you want them to, but if you walk in and order a key lime cheesecake you’re going to be hungry. Same method applies to all the devices, apps, processes, etc. The simplest, most common sense, most effortless thing to do is to just give everyone that works on your behalf an email address on your infrastructure and have them use that email for all company communications.
If they use something else, and for some reason you wish to permit that rule change in your business, request that everything is cc’d to a local shared mailbox where you can keep ownership of it. Don’t make a big deal out of it – we get our office beer and red solo cups from Costco – and believe me we don’t have a massive asset inventory tracking system around it with people signing off on stuff left and right. We just take a picture of the receipt/order form and email to a receipts@ address – done.
Step 3: Get a regulatory compliance plan
The worst thing you can possibly do is start thinking about a plan when you’ve received a request for information or a legal hold. The good news is, step #3 is the simplest one because it’s just a matter of calling us at 877-546-0316 and talking to someone about implementing the Compliance Archiving solution. The complexity isn’t in the technology, it’s with the people and the constant sprawl of apps and devices that hold vital corporate information.
The great news about what we offer with our partners is that anything going in and out of your company can be screened, monitored, reported, and produced on demand or automatically for just a few bucks a month. The biggest challenge is knowing what to do – and you have to actually get started.
We look forward to serving you and making regulatory Compliance Archiving a breeze.
Pro Tip: How to Pitch Encryption and Compliance
Here is something that MSPs always get wrong when it comes to proposing Encryption and Archiving (HIPAA, compliance, eDiscovery): You can’t be something you’re not BUT you have to know the service you’re proposing. More on this topic tomorrow (if I can sneak it by the marketing)
Posted by ExchangeDefender on Thursday, April 5, 2018
Here is something that MSPs always get wrong when it comes to proposing Encryption and Archiving (HIPAA, compliance, eDiscovery): You can’t be something you’re not BUT you have to know the service you’re proposing.
Want to see part TWO of this video?
Disclaimer: There is tasteful profanity and light nudity to really drive the point of how to better interact with your clients. 🙂
ExchangeDefender: Become a Partner
How to kill SPAM without using ExchangeDefender
65% of all emails sent are spam, what’s the solution?
At ExchangeDefender we kill SPAM for a living. We spend a ton of time and energy identifying, filtering, and destroying junk mail. If you’ve ever wondered how you could make your email experience better, even without the massive layered security that ExchangeDefender provides, these are the steps you could take today:
1. Configure strict SPF/DKIM DNS records
SPF and DKIM (DMARC) can help you protect your domain name from being used in SPAM mailbombs. Spammers will often use real email addresses and domains to send forged “spoofed” email messages and SPF/DKIM provide a mechanism for identifying which email server/platform you use. By setting up an SPF/DKIM you can tell places that are receiving email from your domain what to do if the message wasn’t actually sent from you. If your inbox is full of email bounces and non-delivery receipts, someone is using your email address to send junk mail and an SPF/DKIM record will practically eliminate bouncebacks.
2. Get rid of generic email aliases
At ExchangeDefender we manually process SPAM complaints from our customers – that’s how we train our system to eliminate messages that otherwise make it through because they are legitimate in every way we can automatically process them. The number one way to get a ton of annoying email that may be on the borderine between legitimate commercial mail and an unsolicited one: generic email aliases. If you get info@, sales@, admin@ or so on, you are painting a giant bullseye on your Inbox and practically begging to be spammed.
3. Unsubscribe from newsletters
I know, I know, everyone that has your email address supports CAN-SPAM , would never send you unsolicited mail, would never sell their client list… and even if you believe all those lies most of the time, people still get hacked. All the time! As do their ISPs and infrastructure along the way. If you want to reduce the amount of junk mail you deal with, simply reduce the number of places that have your email address. Simple!
4. Don’t click on everything in your Inbox
Sometimes SPAM gets through. Sometimes dangerous stuff from your friends and colleagues gets forwarded around. Sometimes your antivirus isn’t up to date. Sometimes the firewall virus protection is misconfigured our expired. Things happen: none are a good excuse for the simplest thing you can do: avoid clicking on anything in messages that look or seem suspicious.
5. Do not blindly whitelist major ISPs
The second biggest source of SPAM complaints at ExchangeDefender is actually completely self-inflicted: people whitelist major email providers and wonder why blatant junk mail keeps on “slipping through” as whitelisted. Go through your whitelist entries in Outlook, etc and make sure you aren’t whitelisting Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Verizon, AT&T, Hotmail or any of the widely used and abused email domains. Spammers know your email admin doesn’t want to deal with complaints about messages you’re getting from these platforms so they treat them more leniently – so spammers simply abuse them.
It’s really that simple – following these steps will cut your junk mail pile in half within a day. If you want to reduce it to less than 1%, ExchangeDefender is here for you for less than a buck a month or you can layer it and add more protection if you need it because time is money: but no amount of technology and automation can replace just a little bit of common sense.
Federal Trade Commission
CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business
The official website of the Federal Trade Commission, protecting America’s consumers for over 100 years.
VIDEO: Live Archive keeps emails up, and running!
So here is something that has always worked for me: everyone hates outages. Regardless of why I’m invited to speak to anyone about ExchangeDefender, and the billion problems we solve, I am here to help you with just one thing: uptime. If things are working, we can sort everything out, but the fear of the new unknown solution causing downtime is the #1 thing your client is thinking about. So address it first.
Posted by ExchangeDefender on Thursday, March 29, 2018
What’s this video about? Live Archive.
So here is something that has always worked for me: everyone hates outages. Regardless of why I’m invited to speak to anyone about ExchangeDefender, and the billion problems we solve, I am here to help you with just one thing: uptime. If things are working, we can sort everything out, but the fear of the new unknown solution causing downtime is the #1 thing your client is thinking about. So address it first.
What is Live Archive?
Access your email via the cloud when outages happen.
Organizations are constantly facing internet and email outages, maintenance cycles and service unavailability. The key to productivity is being able to access your email even when outages happen Exchange Defender LiveArchive Business Continuity is the solution.
As you send and receive email, we make a copy and store it on our network – when you experience an outage you can just pull up a webmail system on your computer, tablet, or phone and continue where you left off.
Visit Exchange Defender: Email Security, Archiving, and Business Continuity solutions
Why is there suddenly a heavy demand for Encryption?
Email encryption is on the rise, ExchangeDefender offers two types of encryption.
What is behind the growth in the adoption of email encryption?
Over the past year we’ve seen an explosion in sales of ExchangeDefender Email Encryption – which is a surprise given that we’ve not only had it for years but that we’ve also given it away for free. HIPAA has been around for over 20 years, dozens of other regulations that almost all companies ignore have been gone for just as long – so why now?
In one word: penalties.
Companies have long known that they can’t operate efficiently without email – and that they cannot just move files around “just to get it to them” once they see the penalties. But selling a service to someone that has avoided using or paying for it is never an easy discussion so here are the 3 quick questions that should lead you to an effective pitch in under 1 minute:
1. Who sends you encrypted messages?
2. Who could get hurt if this information went public?
3. What is your exposure? How much negligence insurance do you have?
The more they mumble, the more of those questions they cannot answer, the more details or costs or scope they don’t understand, the more they need it. End your question with this line: How comfortable would you be having this conversation in a legal deposition?
Grow your business: Positioning ExchangeDefender’s Encryption feature.
Elevator pitch: How to position ExchangeDefender Encryption as an answer to all of the above problems
→It is included in your ExchangeDefender Pro subscription and it’s transparent – no software to install, nothing to manage or configure.
→ You’ll be using the same process and same security major banks, health care providers and lawyers use – so you’ll be protected from most critical security exploits.
→ Finally, it’s dead simple to use – all your employees need to do is put [ENCRYPT] in the subject when they are sending the message. Doesn’t matter if it’s on the phone our Outlook or Outlook Web Access, it just works.
Ding. You’re done. It’s virtually impossible not to sell this service – and it’s desperately needed by anyone using email to do business or conduct confidential discussions. One more thing: Because encryption is transparent and on demand in the cloud, it also protects you when the security issue is on the recipients end – because email is never stored on their PC or device, if someone hacks their network they won’t be able to get to the info stored in your encrypted message!
If email is a business necessity then email encryption is it’s insurance policy.
If you discuss business over email, then anything confidential that should be in that email should be a matter of employee communication protocol: If you attach something sensitive to this message, you better encrypt it and CYA. This is the way things go at banks, with lawyers, with accountants, with realtors and at nearly every white collar job: Nobody wants to assume the liability so they’ll all do what it takes to protect the data.
And with high profile hacks and compromises in the news daily, is not having it worth risking the whole company?
