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How to protect your business and employees from email fraud.

The cat-and-mouse battle against spammers is projected to swing in favor of the deviants.  The monthly volume of spam on the Internet increased 5.5% February of this year.  This means nearly 9 out of 10 business emails are spam.  But what can you do to protect your business and your empoyees?  There's good news and bad news.

Okay, first the bad news as quoted from the CRN article, Spammers Get Sparter By The Second:

Experts also say that spammers will be going after the smaller businesses -- such as credit unions or doctor's offices -- which often have fewer resources and defensive layers protecting critical data.

Interpretation: Don't become a statistic.  If you can't say with certainty you're protection is solid and up to date, chances are your organization is vulnerable.  But let's not be dramitc about being vulnerable- every company makes concessions of risk in favor of cost savings.  The difference here is the cost of strong quality protection from spam and malware is more than affordable for even the tiniest company.

So what can you do?  There are two first lines of defense, and the good news is the first is free and the second is affordable:

1. Educate your staff.
2. Filter spam before it reaches your network.

The first is so simple it's often overlooked.  The referenced CRN article states,

As they have for years, computer users are still falling for myriad 419 and product scams.

Too many saavy executives assume their staff are educated about scams whereas in reality everyone has been duped one way or another- even the most cautious.  Spamming is a science these days.  Just as your organization might use different marketing techniques to attract leads from different sources, so do spammers.  But make no mistake about it- they systematically know what works and to what percentage.  Some scams may seem obvious but like human viruses they are under constant mutation to determine what provides the best results.

No matter what you purchase to protect your small business from spam some of it's going to get through.  Sorry- that's just the reality of having a computer try to determine if an email is spam.  So integrating Anti-Spam Awareness in to your new hire or Human Resources procedure can go a long way.  And having a 20 minutes awareness talk, either from internal staff or a Web-Kong Security Professional, can be worth gold.  The security guard at the bank weighs in much heavier than the vault, alarms, and security cameras all put together because he actually thinks rather than just monitor.

Number two leads us to actual anti-spam technology, and there are two broad categorizations: Hosted Solutions and onsite product solutions (software or hardware).  Despite providing the same end result they differ greatly in the resources they require from you.  Let's say your small business has 20 employees and each receives on average 15 real emails per day.  According to the statistics that about 90% of email is spam your organization will receive and process 3000 emails.  That's 2700 spam messages in one day just for 20 employees!

Bandwith and processing are the differnce.  Using an onsite piece of hardware or software the spam is still being transmitted to your equiment.  You paid to transmit 2700 spam messages across your Internet connections.  I'm sure you'd much rather have that bandwith for more business productive uses.  And what's worse, after you paid to trasmit that spam to your servers, you now used your own processing resources and power to decide if it was spam or not.  Only for large enterprises is this approach likely to be the most cost effective.

The benefits of a Hosted Solution are the spam is processed off-site on someone elses equipment using their servers and their power.  Once a determination of "spaminess" has been made then, and only then, is an email transmitted to your servers.  You only receive the good email you actually desire.

For these benefits of a Hosted Solution, Web-Kong has partnered with Google to provide the Postini Email Security Solution.  It provides a higher calibre soltion than most small businesses can afford to purchase and manage onsite.  Likewise it requires no capitcal outset and can be scaled to grow with your organization.  And as a unlike an on-site solution no talent is required to manage it, no server run it, and no updates to install.  All upgrades and management are included with your subscription.  The bottom line- you just focus on your business and let Postini do the rest.