30 Minute Interview

“Spam has increased five-fold during the past couple of years”

Wong Joon Hoong, APAC product marketing manager—Enterprise, Trend Micro Malaysia Sdn Bhd, talks to Abhinav Singh about sophisticated messaging threats and Trend Micro’s Layered Messaging Security Strategy to counter them.

Wong Joon Hoong

How vulnerable are enterprise mailboxes today?

The types of messaging threats are increasing, and have become more sophisticated and often more targeted and insidious. The unfortunate reality is that, with attacks primarily motivated by monetary gain, attackers are willing to invest more resources in their development. Spam is the biggest culprit. It is estimated that spam has increased dramatically. Of the total e-mails received by enterprises 75 to 90 percent are spam with the United States being the worst affected. Spammers continue to advance their techniques to bypass traditional anti-spam filters. Spam is evolving with new techniques such as image spam, which is very hard to detect. Techniques such as randomisation and embedded objects make the latest spam campaigns more difficult to combat. Spam has increased five-fold during the past couple of years and companies continue to search for ways to improve spam detection.

Additionally viruses have also evolved dramatically. Originally written by hackers seeking notoriety, today the motivation for virus writers is generally financial gain. For example, ‘bot code is used to take over computers to use them as zombies that send out spam and phishing e-mails with the intention of generating revenue. Phishing has recently expanded into the corporate world with more targeted attacks called Spear Phishing. They are using e-mails that appear to come from a source inside the company, such as the IT or accounting department. These attacks often seek to obtain confidential information that would provide access to the corporation’s network, databases, or other protected resources. Confidential information is also jeopardised by crimeware or spyware.

As large businesses extend their corporate network to the mobile workforce, e-mail security threats have been extended to handheld devices. Is the situation serious?

E-mail security threats to mobile devices are not that prominent but are increasing. SMS spam has increased. Mobile devices are retrieving mail from corporate mail servers and if the concerned company is already using a proper messaging security layer then any virus laden mail is already filtered at the mail server and does not reach the mobile device. In case the mobile phone is accessing external mail then we have a product known as Trend Micro Mobile Security which can work perfectly with a Symbian phone or Windows CE. Our solution is tuned to detect viruses from any external mail servers. There is also the encryption technology on a mobile phones, which can encrypt all mail in the mobile phone’s inbox and this can be decrypted only when a password is typed. Such functionality is extremely helpful in case a mobile phone gets lost or is stolen for then all the messages on the phone remain encrypted.

How is Trend Micro addressing evolved forms of e-mail security threats?

We have embarked on a major version upgrade of our existing messaging products and introduced new-hosted messaging service offerings. We are working on technologies to address image spam and botnet threats. We have an advanced Layered Messaging Security Strategy, which has gateway e-mail security, mail server security and enterprise messaging protection. The gateway e-mail security component aims at stopping Internet attacks at the perimeter and blocks threats before they affect the gateway and prevents bounced mail attacks and also stops outbound e-mail threats at the last network point. The mail server security component keeps interoffice e-mail free of threats and inappropriate content and applies threat intelligence to incoming e-mail and also looks at outgoing e-mail for threats and data privacy concerns. It also scans mail from mobile or remote PCs logging onto the network. The enterprise messaging protection component gives complementary protection with Web security. Additionally we have worked on multi-tier spam prevention technologies and image spam detection which aims at drilling down to the core of the e-mail for image spam detection—for example it strips out background and text colours, dimensions, and other randomised elements in the image spam message. We are also coming out with an integrated e-mail firewall for bounce mail attacks. We have also incorporated improved performance capable of handling 1,80,000 messages per hour in our messaging security products.