Customer profile

A NetFort LANGuardian UK University customer with over twenty thousand network users

Customer pain - SPAM email issues

Clients on the network are using public IP addresses which are all registered to the University. Occasionally student and staff PC’s become  infected with Malware and in some instances these compromised systems start to send large volumes of SPAM email. The University is then at risk of being blacklisted as all email coming from their site would be regarded as SPAM by Internet Service Providers. In some instances a small part of their address range is blocked but we have come across instances where their entire IP range is blacklisted.

Solution - LANGuardian Email Monitor

Click to enlarge image 1

Click to enlarge image 2

The University has deployed the NetFort LANGuardian to monitor activity on the network.  Using the Email Monitor Module, a suspiciously high amount of mail traffic leaving a client on the network was visible on a dashboard and the network admins were also sent an email report with further information. 

The Email Monitor Module reads headers from email transactions on the network and gives visibility into the sender, recipient and subject line.  Unofficial email servers are immediately detected and the university network manager has configured alerts to monitor suspicious activity based on email subject lines that contain certain phrasing or words, for example “Supermodels exposed” (see image 1). The alerts allow him to react quickly and prevent the University IP address from being blacklisted.

The Email Monitor Module view of email which clients are sending unusually high amounts of email (see image 2).

 “Overall, our network is running much more effectively. We noticed a decrease in latency and we can be proactive about tackling potential issues, instead of reacting when the network is on it’s knees. It makes my job a lot easier.”
Network Manager, UK University *
*This NetFort customer has requested that their details remain confidential.
 

Try LANGuardian on your network

You can download and try the NetFort LANGuardian on your network for 30 days as part of the LANGuardian core system. The download is available in ISO (65.4 MB) or VMware (159 MB) format here.

You can also try out the LANGuardian on our live demo system here. Contact support@netforttechnologies.com for assistance.