Barracuda Networks Spam Firewall Overview

Barracuda Spam Firewall:

The Barracuda Spam Firewall is an integrated hardware and software solution for complete protection of your email server. It provides a powerful, easy to use, and affordable solution to eliminating spam and virus from your organization by providing the following protection:

• Anti-spam
• Anti-virus
• Anti-spoofing
• Anti-phishing
• Anti-spyware (Attachments)
• Denial of Service

The Barracuda Spam Firewall is compatible with all email servers and can fit into nearly any corporate or small business environment. It is used by small organizations with as few as 10 employees and large organizations with as many as 200,000 employees. A single Barracuda Spam Firewall handles up to 25,000 active email users and 15 million email messages per day. Multiple units can be clustered together for even greater capacity and high availability.

The Barracuda Spam Firewall protects your email server with ten defense layers:

1. Denial of service and security protection
2. IP block list
3. Rate control
4. Virus check with archive decompression
5. Barracuda virus check
6. User-specified rules
7. Spam fingerprint check
8. Intention analysis
9. Bayesian analysis
10. Rule-based scoring

The Barracuda Spam Firewall architecture optimizes the processing of each email to maximize performance and process millions of messages per day. Unlike software solutions, the Barracuda Spam Firewall reduces the load placed on the email server by off-loading both spam and virus filtering.

In addition, all Barracuda Spam Firewall models include essential outbound filtering techniques including attachment scanning, virus filtering, rate controls and encryption. These features help organizations to ensure that all outgoing email is legitimate and virus-free.

Easy to Use:

With no software to install and no modifications required to existing email systems, installation of the Barracuda Spam Firewall is quick and easy. Once installed, the system administrator uses the intuitive web interface for monitoring and maintenance. With Barracuda Networks Energize Updates, the Barracuda Spam Firewall is continuously updated with the latest spam and virus definitions every hour keeping maintenance to the unit at a minimum and eliminating administrative overhead. Updates are provided by Barracuda Central where engineers work around the clock monitoring the Internet for trends in spam and virus threats.

Affordable:

At Barracuda Networks, we design and build products not only for their power and ease of use, but also for their affordability. With no per user license fees, the Barracuda Spam Firewall is the most affordable enterprise-class spam and virus solution available.

Features:

Email has undoubtedly become a key tool for communications among companies worldwide. With frequent virus attacks and the alarming rate that spam fills inboxes, email is quickly becoming a less efficient means of communication. In fact, the Radicati Group, a market research firm in Palo Alto, California, predicts that by 2007, there will be 50 billion spam messages each day, costing companies almost $200 billion per year. This is simply astounding and unacceptable. It's time to take control of spam.

The Barracuda Spam Firewall is an integrated hardware and software solution that has the power of an enterprise-class solution, and the ease-of-use and affordability that businesses of all sizes demand.

The Barracuda Spam Firewall includes all the features needed to eliminate your spam and completely protect your email server from all forms of attack. Email may be blocked, quarantined, tagged, or delivered based on the policies of the organization or the preferences of the individual user.

Some of the key features and benefits of the Barracuda Spam Firewall are listed below.

Protection Against Email-borne Threats

The Barracuda Spam Firewall provides comprehensive protection against the most current email-borne threats that can cripple your network if left unprotected. With our proprietary ten-layer defense system, the Barracuda Spam Firewall optimizes performance of your email server while utilizing the following protections:

• Anti-spam The algorithms and methods used by the Barracuda Spam Firewall are the most comprehensive and most advanced in the industry at detecting and filtering spam resulting in the lowest rate of false positives.
• Anti-virus By utilizing dual layer virus blocking, decompression of archives and file type blocking, the anti-virus engine in the Barracuda Spam Firewall provides complete virus protection.
• Anti-spoofing This technology prevents the use of forged or "spoofed" sender addresses on unsolicited email. The anti-spoofing feature also allows larger organizations to specify a list of IP addresses that are allowed to have a "From" address that appears from inside the organization to support multiple sites and multiple email servers.
• Anti-phishing The Barracuda Spam Firewall provides robust protection against phishing schemes which are often used to gather confidential information about an organization or it's individual users.
• Anti-spyware (Attachments) - All attachments are scanned and any spyware executables are detected and eliminated immediately.
• Denial of Service Protection Rate controls are utilized to stop denial of service attacks as well as dictionary based spam attacks. These rate control systems are integrated and automatic in the Barracuda Spam Firewall.

End User Control Features

The Barracuda Spam Firewall contains numerous end-user features that allow for individual tuning and greatly enhance the accuracy of our spam filtering.

• User based filtering The Barracuda Spam Firewall can be configured to set spam policies by the end user on an individualized basis or on a global corporate level.
• Individual Spam ScoringThe individual spam scoring feature allows end users to set their individual thresholds for spam tolerance providing personalized control over spam policies.
• Personal Allow and Block Lists The Barracuda Spam Firewall can be configured to allow end users to have control over their individual allow and block lists which further reduces the chance of false positives.
• End-User Quarantine The Barracuda Spam Firewall provides the ability to setup quarantine mailboxes where users can direct questionable email for later review. This greatly reduces the support load for large organizations.
• Digest Emails A daily email is sent to all end users with a quarantine account summarizing the contents of their individual quarantine mailboxes.
• Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes Integration Barracuda Networks provides a software plug-in for both Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes end users. With this tool, users can classify messages as spam or not spam in order to fine-tune the filtering and further eliminate any chance of false positives.

Simplified and Centralized Administration

The Barracuda Spam Firewall features an easy-to-use Web interface, making management and administration of the appliance easy and cost effective. The Web interface allows you to define, manage and control corporate email policies from one central place.

• Multilingual User Interface The Barracuda Spam Firewall features a user interface available in Chinese (simplified and traditional), German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch and English.
• Barracuda Energize Updates A team of security engineers at Barracuda Central continuously monitors the Internet for trends in spam and virus attacks. As they detect trends, Energize Updates are created and distributed to all Barracuda Spam Firewalls, which are automatically updated with new spam rules, spam algorithms, and virus definitions. These updates require zero administration and ensure that your network has comprehensive and accurate protection even as the methods of attack change.
• Logs and Graphical Reports System administrators can view logs or generate graphical reports to provide visibility within the organization. The Barracuda Spam Firewall can generate reports on top email users, top spam recipients, top spam senders, and more.
• No Per User Charges With the Barracuda Spam Firewall there are no per user charges so the system administrator no longer has to worry about keeping track of new accounts.
• Multiple Domains & Multiple Email Servers A single Barracuda Spam Firewall can be used for multiple email servers and for multiple domains resulting in lower administrative costs.

Protection for Large Enterprises

The Barracuda Spam Firewall models 600 and 800 were engineered to meet the specific needs of large enterprises. These models offer all the scalability, redundancy and reliability needed for large-scale deployments at an affordable price.

• Easy Integration with existing Network The Barracuda Spam Firewall integrates with any IT infrastructure no matter how geographically or logically diverse.
• Clustering Multiple Barracuda Spam Firewall models 600 and 800 can also be clustered for automatic scalability, redundancy and fault tolerance.
• Hot Swap Redundant Disk Array and Power Supply These features provide a total solution for reliable fault tolerant data storage management necessary for large enterprises.
• Plug and Play Installation Deploying the Barracuda Spam Firewall is extremely easy. There is no software to install or modifications necessary to your existing email systems, greatly reducing the time and resources required for installation and ongoing support.
• LDAP and Microsoft Active Directory Integration Directory server integration allows for single sign on and recipient verification.