Usage Reports

As part of the Trend Micro Email Reputation Services you will have access to usage reports and will be able to view all query activity between your name server and the NRS servers.

These reports show just a portion of the activity happening at your gateway. Depending on the level of caching you have set up on your system, this is just a percentage of your total email traffic. Each name server has different default settings and each one allows for varying degrees of customization of those settings.

To understand your complete email flow and disposition of messages, you will need to view the logs and reports provided by your email gateway.

What Does the Report Show?

Queries and Connections

For each query made by your name server, there is at least one connection attempt from an IP address. For legitimate messages, this is usually a one to one correlation. For spam messages, there are usually multiple connection attempts from the same IP address. If these connection requests are close in time, then most likely your name server will use the information in its cache to block these subsequent connection requests. Therefore the positive results you see in these graphs only show a portion of the actual amount of spam connections being blocked at your gateway.

Connections and Spam

Research has shown that each spam connection contains 5-10 spam messages and sometimes many more. So if you are blocking 1 connection per second, then you are blocking 5 spam messages per second or over 400,000 spams per day. Gartner Group reports that a company with 10,000 employees suffers more than $13 million worth of lost productivity due to spam, or $50,000 per day.

Viruses and Worms

About 10% of spam messages contain viruses and worms. The most prevalent are mass mailer worms such as Bagle and Netsky which continually change their format to fool antivirus scanners. Based on the 400,000 spam messages above, some 40,000 viruses would arrive on a daily basis! Now the probability is that your Antivirus scanner at the email gateway or even on the desktop would detect and clean these messages, but why let them in, why not stop them before they even enter your Network?

Phishing

About 1% of spams are phishing emails, and this number is growing rapidly. A phishing email looks appears to be a valid email from a reputable organization such as a bank. But on closer inspection the email is fake and is used for criminal activity such as collecting passwords, credit card numbers and other personal information. According to the above statistics some 4,000 phishing emails would arrive daily!

EMPLOYING EMAIL REPUTATION SERVICES STOP THESE THREATS BEFORE THEY EVEN ENTER YOUR NETWORK.

This is a valuable and cost effective first layer of defense!!