It is often thought that Viruses and Malware are the biggest threats to your personal information, but there is even a greater threat that often goes undetected. Social Engineering is a technique used by people to gather your personal or secure information without you even thinking twice about giving it away. Social Engineering is most often performed over the phone, but could just as easily be done via email, text messaging, or any other form of communication; you can be Social Engineered by anyone.

In the most basic form, Social Engineering is when someone poses as someone else (i.e. a trusted friend or colleague) to trick you into divulging sensitive information.  ”Hey, this is PayPal, please follow this link and re-enter all your banking details — its ok, really!”

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LuxSci’s Premium Email Archival service offers the storage of an unlimited amount of email that is easily searchable and downloadable.

The period of time that email is retained in the archives is a customer decision.  Previously, the options were 1, 3, 5, or 7 years.  After that time period, messages auto-expire from the archives.

Now, customers may select from a broader range of retention periods — from as little as 30 days to as long as 10 years.

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LuxSci and its partner McAfee have made a number of improvements to LuxSci’s Premium Email Filtering and Archival service.  They include:

• Multiple data centers for Premium Email Filtering. Customers can choose to have their email filtered in any of the following data centers: Hong Kong, Amsterdam (Netherlands), Auckland (New Zealand), London (United Kingdom), Sydney (Australia), Tokyo (Japan).  For customers whose email is delivered to their own email servers near one of these locations, these alternate data centers can provider faster delivery.  If you are interested in using an alternate data center, please contact Support.
• The Spam Control Outlook add-in now supports Outlook 2010.  This can be downloaded here.
• Larger Messages: The Premium Email Archival has been updated to support messages up to 50MB in size.
• The Premium Email Archival portal has been upgraded to expose many useful statistics, such as: archival polling attempts, successful polls, failed polls, messages archived, messages pending processing, and the date and time of the last successful and failed poll.  Additionally, administrators can now define alerts to be sent in various situations, such as when there are connections problems, login problems, the number of pending messages gets too big, or your historical storage limit has been reached.
• Message Audit: Customers interested can now be granted access to a “Message Audit” feature. This is a new self-help tool that enables authorized administrators to verify the disposition of any inbound or outbound message from the previous 14 days through searches based on Message Details, Message ID or Message Header.

LuxSci has added two new features to help administrators manage the forwarding of email in their accounts so that they can meet HIPAA and other regulatory requirements and at the same time easily control the actions of their users:

• Globally restricting email forwarding to only recipients whose email servers support SMTP TLS for message transport encryption, and
• Globally restricting users from managing their own email forwarding settings.

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LuxSci has been a partner of MX Logic since 2003, integrating with them to provide Premium Email Filtering and Premium Email Archival.

Over the weekend of Jan. 22-24, MX Logic will deploy a wide range of service and feature enhancements, many of which will reflect the initial phase of changes from MX Logic to McAfee (they were recently acquired by McAfee).  These changes include:

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LuxSci and its partner MX Logic have released a series of updates to LuxSci’s Premium Email Filtering and Premium Email Archival services.  These changes include:

• Improved look and feel for the Premium Email Filtering portal.
• Localization of these portal pages into many languages such as: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and Korean
• New archival import services to facilitate import of historical data sets larger than 50 GB into the archival system.
• New Outlook 2007 integration with Premium Email Archival permits searching for, viewing, and saving copies of archived messages directly through Outlook 2007.  This Outlook add-in can be downloaded via the Online Help area of the archival portal.
• New “backscatter” filter allows administrators to block the receipt of all inbound bounce messages (available under the inbound policies – anti-spam – classification – more options area).

For complete details of all of the changes to the Premium Filtering and Archival services, see this service enhancement announcement from MX Logic.

LuxSci’s Premium Email Filtering services include an optional "Click Protection" module that allows administrators to intercept the action of a user clicking on a link in an email message in order to  a) give the users warning,  b) log where people click through to, c) block clicking, etc.  This feature helps protect end users from phishing attacks that come in via email, where malicious senders try to trick users into going to fake URLs so they can steal their identity or payment data (i.e. the classic fraudulent emails purporting to be from "PayPal" come to mind as a prime example).

On Tuesday, January 27^th, an administrative option within ClickProtect that currently tracks URL click throughs while allowing users to visit websites linked within email messages without a warning is being removed.

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We have recently seen a significant increase in occurrences where users are getting Spam email messages that appear to come from their own address (i.e. “joe@domain.com” gets a Spam email addressed from “joe@domain.com”).  We discussed this issue tangentially in a previous posting: Bounce Back & BackScatter Spam – “Who Stole My Email Address”? However, many users wonder how this is possible, while others are concerned that their Spam filters are not catching these messages.

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With the amount of business done via email these days, it’s not uncommon to receive dozens if not hundreds of messages a day. If you’re the kind of person that doesn’t like them all stacking up in your inbox, then you’re probably already familiar with the concept of mail filters or rules. A filter is like your own personal mail elf, quickly sorting, organizing, or discarding your incoming mail according to your explicit instructions. This makes it easy to manage high volumes of incoming mail automatically without having to manually move, forward, or delete even a single message. Almost all filters can match a given text string in the subject or body of the message and then take one of these basic actions; however LuxSci’s Custom Mail Filters (included with all email hosting accounts) provide an even more extensive list of capabilities:

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Internet service providers Global Crossing and Hurricane Electric shut down the San Jose, CA, web hosting provider "McColo" on Tuesday after it was determined that the ISP was aiding criminals in the sending of Spam, perpetrating online fraud, and providing access to child pornography.  McColo was used by some of the most active and prolific spammers in the world; the suspension of its services has resulted in a 75% decrease in spam, worldwide!

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