Follow the Australian Telecommunications scene NEWSLETTER- FREE TRIAL
 | |
|
Technology news and Jobs 
The Linux distillery Enterprise-grade Linux: Five network security FOSS apps
The Linux distillery Enterprise-grade Linux: Five network security FOSS apps | Enterprise-grade Linux: Five network security FOSS apps |
|
| by David M Williams | |
| Wednesday, 23 January 2008 | |
|
Page 2 of 3 It’s entirely possible for a Linux server to be hosting virus-infected files, whether as e-mail attachments or stored files on a Samba share or something else. Now, these will not harm Linux or its users, but it would be a terrible crime against the Internet as a whole to be ignorantly passing viruses on.Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
Like Snort, the wide community of ClamAV users contribute signatures for new detected virus threats. SpamAssassin Recently, I covered a couple of open source anti-spam products, one of which was SpamAssassin. Like its name suggests, this app kills spam - resulting in a far happier suite of users. SpamAssassin can not be easily dismissed by detractors of free software; it is the very engine used behind a large range of commercial products and is extremely effective. SpamAssassin is mature and employs a rich suite of tests to identify genuine spam including analysing the message text, the e-mail headers, DNS blacklists, collaborative filtering databases, statistical models and other mechanisms. SpamAssassin doesn’t replace your mail server and nor does it make any assumptions as to what your mail server is or the platform. You can continue running Sendmail, Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino or whatever product it is you run. Instead, SpamAssassin will receive your e-mail in the first instance, purge it of spam and then pass it on to the mail server in place. Do be warned, SpamAssassin can be tricky to configure – and hence the plethora of proprietary tools which add a GUI frontend and integration with specific products. However, poking around the Internet will often yield the answers you need and a little time spent setting it up will bring back massive benefits in killing spam without paying a price per mailbox as most other products would ask. Nicely, SpamAssassin will also let you fire other programs on each e-mail received making it a no-brainer to tie in ClamAV giving both anti-spam and anti-virus protection at the same time. L7 Filter L7 Filter is a nice, but perhaps little known, SourceForge project which provides an add-in module for iptables, the Linux firewall product. This obviously means it requires a Linux firewall be on your network for L7 Filter to be of use to you. L7 Filter makes it possible to detect and prevent a range of network protocols which would otherwise be difficult to detect because they work over a number of different ports and aren’t limited to just one. An example: companies often want to block BitTorrent applications which may be running on any of a range of different ports. Or, they might want to block MSN Messenger or other instant messaging applications; now these do usually a fixed port but can possibly switch to other ports including the web port, port 80, becoming burdensome for administrators to stop outright. What can you do ... CONTINUED
|
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
