Virus & Spam Filtering

Description

Protect your business from viruses, junk email and suspicious attachments 24 hours a day without any input or management updates required by you or your people. The Voice email filtering service checks and cleanses your email against known viruses before it reaches you thereby reducing the waste of having to download your email before it is filtered.

Our filtering mechanisms are checked for the latest codes and uploaded as required at least three times each and every day, thereby providing a high level of protection. We filter out any known malicious code and replace it with a cleansed explanatory text message to the sender and to the recipient.

Virus Filtering cannot guarantee detection and removal of all viruses. It will act on messages and their attachments as they pass through our equipment, therefore this will not protect you form other sources of infection such as CDs and floppy discs. We recommend a sound work place policy to be used in conjunction with our filtering to increase your protection.

Some Facts on Viruses

A computer virus is a program or a piece of malicious executable code that has the unique ability to replicate. They spread quickly and are often difficult to eradicate. They can attach themselves to just about any type of file and are spread as files that are copied and sent from individual to individual.

In addition to replication, some computer viruses deliver a damage routine. These routines may only display messages or images, however they can also destroy files, reformat your hard drive, or cause other damage. Alternatively it can consume your storage space and memory, and degrade the performance of your computer.

The Internet is an ideal transport mechanism to distribute viruses. With email now used as an essential business communication tool, viruses are spreading faster than ever. Viruses attached to email messages can infect an entire enterprise in a matter of minutes, costing businesses millions of dollars annually in lost productivity and clean-up expenses.

More than 60,000 viruses have been identified, and 400 new ones are created every month, according to the International Computer Security Association (ICSA). Most individuals and businesses will encounter virus outbreaks. No computer user is immune to viruses.

Some Facts on Spam

Spam email is one of the fastest growing silent costs to business today, and one that is difficult to allocate on the general ledger. It eats into your employees' time in dealing with it at their desktop, and chokes your internet access as well as your internal network with useless traffic, at your cost.

Perhaps of greatest concern is that much of the material sent via spam is considered offensive, containing information and images that are profound and pornographic. Such material can lead to harassment and legal liability issues.

Here are some industry extracts of interest:

• It is estimated that 34 percent of all messages handled by companies relate to unsolicited commercial email.
  Gartner 2002
• With an estimated 39% of emails containing spam material, around 2.1million spam messages are received and circulated every year in a typical 1000 employee organization.
  IDC 2001
• A 1,000 user network would receive over two million spam emails each year at a cost of $6.5 million.
  Coalition Against Unsolicited Bulk Email (CAUBE), Australia, 2002
• The volume of spam in 2001 increased sixfold over that for 2000.
  CAUBE, 2001
• Hotmail, owned by Microsoft, is, by virtue of its 110 million users, among the world's biggest email providers. It is, therefore, one of the world's biggest spam buckets. The number of messages it gets each day is closing in on 2 billion. Up to 80 percent are spam.
  Houston Chronicle July 2002

Prices

Virus and Spam filtering is offered as options with our ADSL Broadband Internet, Dialup Internet, or Web Hosting products.