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IM Security

Protect Against Vulnerabilities and Inappropriate Use

IM SecurityAccording to Gartner, "By 2010, 90% of people with business e-mail accounts will also have IM accounts," despite the fact that, according to Nemertes Research, 70% of IT executives claim to have banned the use of commercial IM services!

Instant messaging is quickly becoming prevalent as a business critical communications tool and with its use comes new security challenges, from technical vulnerabilities to inappropriate usage risks. The consequences of IM security breaches are equally as diverse, ranging from individual and corporate embarrassment to significant financial and productivity losses.

The reality for IT organizations is that—authorized or not—IM is being used on most networks and—authorized or not—it poses a serious security threat if left unchecked.

Quest Policy Authority for UC helps IT organizations address the risks associated with IM while ensuring that their users have continued access to this essential productivity and communications tool. Policy Authority provides the most comprehensive defense against IM borne viruses, worms, phishing, spam, and social engineering. Read below to learn more.


Risk
Impact
How Quest Policy Authority Helps
Spyware, Trojans, Virus and Worm Attacks Virus attacks named leading culprit of financial loss by U.S. companies in 2006 (CSI/FBI Computer Crime and Security Survey). Policy Authority protects against both known and zero-day virus infections through automatically updated filters and heuristic analysis including bot-defeating technology. Policy Authority integrates with Sophos and Symantec to make this happen.
File Transfer Attacks Trojan horse programs and other corrupt files sent over IM are undetected by email AV engines. Policy Authority provides gateway security by filtering all IM traffic for content, viruses, spyware, worms, and inappropriate use.
Spam over Instant Messaging (SPIM) IM worms, such as Osama Found, send unsolicited IM advertisements to a user's buddy list. When Policy Authority receives a message containing an unknown URL, it alerts the IT administrator and puts the URL on a list of disallowed Web addresses, while preventing any further propagation of the message. Any future IM traffic containing the URL is automatically blocked once it is in the disallow list.
Identity Theft Uncontrolled screen names allow rogue users to impersonate others and misrepresent company employees (for example, CEO@your-company.com) Policy Authority correlates end user identities from the corporate directory to user handles and phone numbers for all real-time communications platforms.
Client Vulnerabilities Buffer overflow vulnerabilities in AOL, MSN and Yahoo are well known and documented by CERT Coordination Center of Carnegie Mellon. Policy Authority shuts down IM sessions in the event that a single user ID attempts to send more messages per second than any human could normally send.
HTTP Tunneling and Port Crawling IM applications are designed to evade traditional network security blocking mechanisms. Policy Authority provides blocking and alerting of unauthorized IM or peer-to-peer use on corporate networks. This is complemented by the protection for off-network PC's and laptops where employees circumvent IM management gateways.
Leakage of Confidential Information Protecting sensitive information is difficult when conversations with outsiders are uncontrolled. Policy Authority provides content filtering and tagging for IM conversations utilizing regular expressions. This helps prevent the loss of sensitive data, enables e-discovery, and protects against abusive or inappropriate language.


White Paper: Compliance and Data Loss Prevention in Unified Communications Solutions Case Study: Read how customers are benefiting from Policy Authority White Paper: Best Practices for IM Management
 
 


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