Symantec Brightmail Gateway

Symantec Brightmail Gateway Overview

Symantec Brightmail Gateway delivers inbound and outbound messaging security, real-time antispam and antivirus protection, advanced content filtering, data loss prevention, and email encryption. It catches more than 99% of spam with less than one in a million false positives, global and local IP reputation analysis, and comprehensive reporting to deliver cost-effective protection against new messaging threats.

Symantec Brightmail™ Gateway delivers inbound and outbound messaging security, with effective and accurate real-time antispam and antivirus protection, advanced content filtering, data loss prevention, and email encryption. Brightmail Gateway is simple to administer and catches more than 99% of spam with less than one in a million false positives. With Brightmail Gateway, organizations can effectively respond to new messaging threats, minimizing network downtime, preserving employee productivity, and protecting company reputation. The product leverages real-time automatic antispam and antivirus updates from the Symantec™ Global Intelligence Network, on-box connection throttling using both global and self-learning local IP reputation, and powerful on-demand reporting, unified administrative controls, and flexible work flow, simplify management and drive down administrative costs. Advanced content filtering, data loss prevention, and email encryption help organizations control sensitive data, reduce the risks associated with data loss, and meet regulatory compliance and corporate governance demands.

Brightmail Gateway is available as both a physical appliance and a VMware-certified virtual appliance, enabling organizations to easily add or remove antispam capacity to keep messages flowing in the face of growing, unpredictable spam volume. It is part of Symantec™ Protection Suite Enterprise Edition, an endpoint, messaging and backup security suite that protects against complex data loss, malware, and spam threats from desktop to gateway and ensures data is backed up—controlling costs and managing risk.

Antispam and antivirus protection helps ensure uptime and productivity

The Brightmail Antispam™ engine is based on over 10 years of experience fighting spam. Unlike many other engines, Brightmail employs over 20 different antispam technologies. Brightmail Gateway delivers greater than 99 percent effectiveness and a critical false positive rate of less than one in a million, making it one of the industry’s most accurate solutions.1Brightmail Gateway delivers real-time protection from new attacks with real-time automatic antispam updates, leveraging the Global Intelligence Network which includes:

• Over 120 million antivirus sensors
• Over 40,000 firewall and intrusion detection sensors
• Managed security deployments in 70 countries
• Symantec’s patented Probe Network of over 2.5 million decoy accounts

Symantec protects more than 800 million mailboxes from viruses and spam. Brightmail Adaptive Reputation Management delivers on-box connection throttling, combining both global and self-learning local IP reputation analysis with intelligence resource allocation to improve spam filtering by blocking malicious senders at the network level. By reducing spam volume and keeping email secure, Brightmail Gateway protects messaging infrastructure and helps ensure business uptime and user productivity.

Brightmail Gateway offers unparalleled antivirus protection as demonstrated over 40 consecutive VB100 effectiveness ratings, since November 1999, and includes zero-day antivirus protection, reducing the risk of downtime by proactively detecting and quarantining suspicious messages before definitions become available.

Brightmail Gateway integrates IM protection against viruses and spim (IM-based spam), including the industry’s first zero-day threat protection from IM-borne viruses and worms.

Outbound control of sensitive data flow helps enforce regulations and protect company reputation

Brightmail Gateway features advanced content filtering and data loss prevention technologies that make it easier to protect and control sensitive data. Administrators can easily build effective and flexible policies that enforce regulatory compliance and protect against data loss. Incident management, keyword and regular expression scanning inside messages and attachments, and true file typing help administrators gain control over messaging content and comply with regulations. Prebuilt templates and dictionaries allow customers to easily deploy policies that manage risks associated with data loss, internal governance, and compliance with specific regulations. Brightmail Gateway appliances leverage integration with sophisticated structured data matching technology from Symantec™ Data Loss Prevention, which analyzes data held in databases (e.g., customer and patient records, banking information, order processing, CRM, etc.) and creates unique fingerprints for the actual data. Administrators can create policies that enforce encryption or "Hold for Review" before allowing their delivery, providing an opportunity for administrative intervention by compliance or legal staff if needed. These and other easy-to-configure, integrated workflow tools enable the creation of policies to control data and respond to policy violations — while the use of email encryption allows business to continue uninterrupted.

Symantec Content Encryption – premium subscription

Email is the most common form of business communication used today. More and more companies are quickly realizing the need for encrypted email as a result of federal and state regulations that require private information be encrypted. However, the protection of sensitive information needs to be balanced with the transparent flow of business information. Sophisticated content filtering can prevent sensitive information from leaving an organization, but what if that information is necessary for business? Combining the content filtering and data loss prevention capabilities of Brightmail Gateway with Symantec Content Encryption, a premium add-on, allows secure, transparent email exchange while maintaining regulatory compliance.

The laws and regulations are clear, sensitive content in email must be encrypted. No matter what industry you are in, there are laws and regulations that affect how you handle sensitive information. Yet, email is the primary means by which most employees exchange information. Symantec Content Encryption, in combination with Brightmail Gateway, protects you from stiff fines and costly data breaches while allowing your business to continue to grow.

Unified management and administration reduces cost and complexity

Brightmail Gateway includes a powerful control center for unified management and administration of an organization’s messaging infrastructure. From a single Web-based console, administrators can easily manage multiple Brightmail Gateway appliances to view trends, attack statistics, and noncompliance incidents. By removing the complexity of multiple consoles, disparate policies, and incompatible logging and reporting procedures, Brightmail Gateway significantly reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) of messaging security infrastructure. Brightmail Gateway supports a full set of reporting options, including a dashboard and executive summaries that highlight system efficacy and impact. Reporting helps administrators proactively identify data loss trends and demonstrate compliance. The management console includes more than 50 preset reports that can be customized by content or time, scheduled for automatic report generation, and exported. Simplified message tracking through a graphical message-auditing interface gives administrators the ability to quickly determine message disposition. Brightmail Gateway requires very little configuration out of the box, facilitating easy and fast initial deployment. Spam signatures and virus definitions are automatically updated in real-time, leveraging the powerful Global Intelligence Network to simplify management and help ensure the benefits of the latest threat detection across the enterprise.

Feature and Benefits:

Key Features:

• Industry leading antispam with greater than 99% effectiveness and accuracy of less than 1 in a million false positives, with real-time automatic updates
• Reliable and effective antivirus protection, including zero-day protection, with over 40 VB100 awards since November 1999
• Advanced content filtering, data loss prevention, and encryption protect sensitive client data and valuable confidential information
• Comprehensive reporting featuring a dashboard, executive summary and detailed reports demonstrating efficacy and impact while proactively highlighting threat trends and potential compliance issues

Key Benefits:

• Protects messaging infrastructure and helps ensure business uptime and user productivity by reducing spam volume and keeping email secure.
• Protects messaging infrastructure and helps ensure business uptime and user productivity by eliminating malware threats.
• Protects company reputation and manages risks associated with data loss, internal governance, and regulatory compliance.
• Reduces administrative costs by removing the complexity of multiple consoles, disparate policies, and incompatible logging and reporting, while demonstrating efficacy and impact of messaging security.

New Features:

Symantec Brightmail Gateway appliances feature integrated, award-winning antispam, antivirus, advanced content filtering, and data loss prevention technologies to protect against email-borne threats and control the flow of sensitive data at the SMTP gateway. Customers running earlier versions of the software can take advantage of the following new features:

Better Protection

• Automated Feedback Loop – Streamlined Probe Network participation allows customers to provide local real-time threat intelligence back to Symantec, improving antispam effectiveness tailored to the customer’s environment.
• Real Time Updates – New communication architecture allows Brightmail Gateway to download antispam rule micro updates as frequently as every second, to better defend against new threats and improve overall effectiveness.
• Improved Defenses Against Targeted Attacks – A new antispam module applies machine learning to better target distributed low volume attacks such as 419 spam and phishing attacks.
• Support for DKIM – Symantec Brightmail Gateway can sign and verify DomainKey Identified Mail (DKIM), allowing companies to protect their email domain against abuse by spammers.

Greater Control

• Symantec Content Encryption – A new premium add-on service to Symantec Brightmail Gateway, Symantec Content Encryption integrates Brightmail Gateway’s powerful advanced content filtering and data loss prevention policies with a hosted encryption service to allow customers to encrypt sensitive outbound email without managing any additional infrastructure.
• Improved Incident Management – Configurable incident folder management reduces the effort spent managing quarantined compliance and data loss prevention incidents, including the ability to automate remediation options.

Increased Scalability

• High-Performance LDAP Integration – New LDAP integration architecture scales support for recipient validation, authentication, address resolution, and email routing based on a company’s LDAP infrastructure to very large enterprise deployments.
• Robust Spam Quarantine Architecture – New Spam Quarantine architecture leverages high-speed disk access to improve performance and increase scalability by up to two orders of magnitude.

Improved Manageability

• Support for SMTP Authentication – SMTP Authentication allows mail clients to authenticate and connect directly to Symantec Brightmail Gateway without connecting to a groupware server.

System Requirements:

Appliance Platforms

• Symantec Brightmail 8300 Series appliances
• Symantec Mail Security 8300 Series appliances

Virtual Hypervisors (Virtual Edition)

• VMware ESX 3.5 (rev 4 or later)
• VMware vSphere 4.0
• VMware ESXi 3.5 (rev 3 or later), ESXi 4.0

Browser Requirements (Administrative Console)

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0, 7.0, 8.0
• Firefox 3.0, 3.5

Screenshots:

Dashboard
The Dashboard provides a convenient snapshot of the appliance, including recent spam, virus, and compliance trends. The Dashboard also includes current appliance status, date of definitions, date of license expiration, and other useful top-level information.

Executive Summary
The Executive Summary provides a top-level summary of spam, content filtering, and virus filtering on your messaging traffic. The Executive Summary highlights recent trends and potential emerging threats to your messaging infrastructure.

Virus Summary
The Virus Summary includes both graphs and tables on recent known and potentially viral activity. Reporting can be run on an ad hoc basis or set on a recurring schedule and can be exported to different file formats or sent via email to specified recipients.

Spam Summary
The Spam Summary highlights spam patterns in graphs and tables, and can be set to run on different granularity, from hourly data to daily, weekly, or monthly patterns.

Compliance Summary
The Compliance Summary highlights potential compliance violations on inbound and outbound messages. The appliance has a full range of configurable actions that can be set for each compliance policy including: creating an incident, holding the message for review, and deleting the message, amongst others.

Reputation Summary
The Reputation Summary highlights the usage of IP reputation by the appliance to determine a connection’s legitimacy. IP reputation is used to make both good and bad judgments on incoming connections. The summary also includes a detailed breakdown of good and bad reputation profiles in order to highlight emerging patterns and potential attacks.

Documentation:

Download the Symantec Brightmail Gateway Datasheet (PDF).