Internet bandwidth is a finite and expensive resource; protect it from spammers, criminals, hackers, time-wasters and employee misuse. When it comes to internet bandwidth, most companies don’t even know about the loss, let alone take steps to prevent it. How can this be prevented
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Snormossel
Expert Member
You can have a look at this. http://www.visualnetworksystems.com/netflow-tracker
Srack0verflow
Expert Member
block all internet access to the sectaries forwarding quotes or quizzes to people they don't even know. or better yet, fire them for potentially spreading trojans.
The firewall is in place cisco routers and firewall gives al the stats. Spam gets blocked
Streaming media and web browsing represent a constant drain on your bandwidth but email poses a different kind of risk. It is less bandwidth-intensive because individual emails are relatively small in size. However, the sheer volume of spam and the constant stream of unwanted messages represent a constant drain.
It is completely possible, on a bad day, for a company with a hundred employees to receive 1,000 legitimate emails and 200,000 spam messages. Around 90 percent of all emails processed by mail servers are spam messages. The problem is made worse by spammers’ use of random name generation to send emails to people at a given address even if they don’t work there. For example, you might be [email protected] but spammers are also sending email to random *@domain.com. It costs them nothing to send these messages because they use malware to turn thousands of unprotected PCs into spam factories. Spam spikes and bounceback spam can cause huge, short-term bandwidth problems. Spikes occur when spammers try new tactics, new botnets come online or when spammers use attachments in their spam messages. Spikes can produce a 25-fold increase in spam in a short period. Bounceback spam occurs when spammers use your email address as the ‘reply-to’ address in their messages. You end up dealing with all the ‘message not delivered’ and ‘out of office’ responses from recipients. This can produce another temporary burst in traffic and some companies see more than half of their spam load resulting from bounceback. Dealing with spam is a burden on companies with in-house spam filtering software. Every message has to be downloaded, whether it is wanted or not. It must then be processed to check if it is spam or if it contains malware. With nine spams for every real message, the result is that many companies have email systems that are ten times more capable (and expensive) than they actually need to be to process legitimate emails. When a spam tsunami hits, everything slows down. As a result, expensive bandwidth is wasted and legitimate business emails must wait their turn for processing, causing unnecessary delays.
Chevron
Serial breaker of phones
Heard of uncapped?
With a hundred employees broadband dont work Its not a question of uncapped, the line speed that im talking about. Wasting of bandwidth and networks that come to a halt thats the problem.
A single 4Mbps ADSL line is sufficient for browsing for over 600 employees where I work.
We use a caching proxy server with strict policies.
You only get full access to the Internet if you're a manager or need special access and even then you are limited and monitored for abuse.
All other users can only browse a list of business related web sites.
Webmail sites, Youtube, Facebook, etc. are banned for all users.
Once a download or Flash application reaches 4MiB the bandwidth is rate limited down to 500 Bytes/sec during business hours. This limit is removed after hours.
The managers are emailed a report of their staff web usage every week if their staff use more than 50MiB per week for personal browsing.
Managers have live reports of their staff's browsing (URLs and bandwidth).
The problem is that most organisations aren't strict enough on personal use of the Web and email and it ends up being a free for all.
If we allowed staff to browse at will, more than half the company would sit and surf all day long instead of working.
Certain South African's have a poor work ethic (do as little as possible for as much salary as possible).
We use a caching proxy server with strict policies.
You only get full access to the Internet if you're a manager or need special access and even then you are limited and monitored for abuse.
All other users can only browse a list of business related web sites.
Webmail sites, Youtube, Facebook, etc. are banned for all users.
Once a download or Flash application reaches 4MiB the bandwidth is rate limited down to 500 Bytes/sec during business hours. This limit is removed after hours.
The managers are emailed a report of their staff web usage every week if their staff use more than 50MiB per week for personal browsing.
Managers have live reports of their staff's browsing (URLs and bandwidth).
The problem is that most organisations aren't strict enough on personal use of the Web and email and it ends up being a free for all.
If we allowed staff to browse at will, more than half the company would sit and surf all day long instead of working.
Certain South African's have a poor work ethic (do as little as possible for as much salary as possible).
Im sure there is lots of fustration in your company.
This is a media company with 20 African branches all on VPN. Every employee must have internet to do there work properly. We do mind what the employees do it the spam 90% of email we reject as spam using up valueble bandwidth.
Not really - most of the employees only need access to a small handful of business related web sites.
Yeah, I forgot to add that it depends on the type of industry you're in.
Our marketing department needs full Internet access and use more bandwidth than the other users.
With regards to spam there are two options that I can think of (maybe you're already using them):
1.
Use a hosted SMTP relay outside of your network on the Internet and block the spam before it comes down your lines.
A hosted mail server may be more costly than extra bandwidth though so you'll have to do the sums first.
Maybe your ISP can provide better anti-spam features on your account?
2.
Make sure your mail server's anti-spam engine can pick up spam messages from the headers and using DNSBL.
That way it can block the spam based on just the senders IP address/domain or the email headers which are transmitted before the content (without having to download the entire message).
It will cut down on bandwidth and also save CPU cycles on content scanning. Why download the entire message if you're just going to trash it anyway.
Depending on your Co's Network setup, best would be to configure some kind of Proxy Server and then limit access to desirable sites and ban everything else. Pretty simple setup actually. Some of our Clients typically use Squid which is both a proxy server and web cache daemon. Do some googling on it.
Your are obviously not in control of your network, it's very easy to get 600 people to use a single 4MB line if you have the equipment and skills to implement... . but like you said, you don't mind what the employees are doing, now there is your problem! If you have no idea what they are doing, how are you going to solve anything??
PsyWulf
Honorary Master
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Our current Mail filtering stats:
Our current mail filtering solution provider is Microsoft Forefront Online http://www.microsoft.com/online/exchange-email-filtering.aspx
At $1.75 per person per month it really isn't expensive and quite robust/customizable
Free 30 day trial is also available
It can also function as a Mail-spooling service for your mail if you have connectivity issues. Overall i'm quite happy with their service. If you're serious about keeping your mail system clean you have to try something like that
Our current mail filtering solution provider is Microsoft Forefront Online http://www.microsoft.com/online/exchange-email-filtering.aspx
At $1.75 per person per month it really isn't expensive and quite robust/customizable
Free 30 day trial is also available
It can also function as a Mail-spooling service for your mail if you have connectivity issues. Overall i'm quite happy with their service. If you're serious about keeping your mail system clean you have to try something like that