End-to-end encryption can be configured per user, per department or enterprisewide. It typically works using public-key encryption, with end users storing their public keys on servers that anyone can access--most frequently on servers maintained by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or PGP. When a user sends an e-mail message, it's immediately encrypted using the recipient's public key found on key servers located on the Internet. Once the message is received, the recipient uses a private key to decrypt and view the message. This technology is getting easier to install and implement, but to encrypt a message, the recipient's public key is required, so if a recipient doesn't have one (and most don't) e-mail messages sent to that recipient will not be encrypted. There is, of course, a mechanism by which users are notified whether their e-mail was sent securely.
Stop Viruses, Can Spam
Eliminating virus threats from e-mail is a two-fold process. First, you must prevent viruses from entering your e-mail infrastructure by using software or hardware. Then, you must ensure your solution is updating its virus-definition files--year-old definition files are useless. And it's not sufficient to simply deploy protection that scans incoming e-mail for viruses; you must prevent users from spreading the infection among internal e-mail servers as well as to computers outside your IT networks. Second, each desktop computer must have virus-scanning software that searches e-mail attachments to remove the threat of infection.
McAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro and other security vendors all offer add-on software that downloads regular updates to ensure you have the latest signatures for current viruses. You also can replace your inbound gateway e-mail servers with an appliance capable of removing virus content from e-mail. IronPort, Sonicwall and Symantec offer e-mail security in hardware devices that do more than virus scanning; these appliances also find potential malicious content.
As we mentioned last November, legislation such as the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 has not led to a decrease in the amount of spam a typical end user receives (see "Spam Filters: Still Sick of Spam"). Content-filtering software, however, can reduce the number of spam and phishing messages that make their way to e-mail in-boxes. Our Network Computing Barracuda spam filter tagged 86.7 percent of all our mail as spam earlier this year--that's 7,348,391 messages. That ratio was relatively unchanged from testing we did in October 2005 and May 2004. (Barracuda won Network Computing's 2005 Well-Connected Award in the Antispam Tool category.)
