The cyberspace is not very safe anymore for businesses thinking that they are peacefully carrying on their legitimate business in the global economy. Someone out there may be using your PCs and servers to carry on with his or her black deeds! The worst part of the story is that he may not even know you and you too may never get to know him.

Billions of e-mails are floating in cyberspace at any given time and attackers and hackers are riding on them like never before. You must never allow yourself to be a vehicle for them. It may cost you your business and reputation. You must make sure that you remain in the good books and never get caught in the black lists. Unfortunately, if you do get into a black list–it's not impossible to get out of it, but not before it has cost you your business in one form or other and a lot of dollars as well.

Yes, we are talking here again about Spam! Rather, Spam loaded with viruses. Viruses are generating much more spam today than humans trying to sell 'V1*a-G-r@' and other such similar stuff. This other kind of spam is being used by viruses to spread them out in cyberspace. Once such a virus gets control of your computer and the Outlook Express or any other e-mail client that you may be using, your PC becomes a spam center, sending hundreds or thousands of virus infected mails out from your company's innocent unprotected mail server.

Symptoms of virus-infected PC
The first indication of this virus infection by spam is the bounced messages that you start receiving from e-mail addresses you have never seen or known. Many of them can be auto generated fictitious e-mail addresses like john@yourcompany.com or mary@yourcompany.com and you know that no John or Mary works for your company. You may even start receiving e-mails from John and Mary with attached Zip files and Exe files.

This is happening at many peace loving legitimate businesses, which still think that using e-mail for business is as simple as typing a message in Outlook Express and hitting the Send button! It's time for them to take this e-mail business seriously and also time for providers of corporate e-mail solutions to take note of the situation. A lot of business is waiting for them to be bagged, through customer education and by responding to the situation fast.

Here is a case study of a potential customer struggling to find the right e-mail solution provider without much success. Call it company X for convenience. This company X used to think that having a website with POP3 and Alias e-mail accounts is all that is required to carry on with their business e-mail communications. Never implemented any e-mail scanning, spam filtering or firewall solutions. All they had was a standard anti-virus package installed on all PCs in the company with auto-update enabled.

For various reasons, this simple anti-virus package was not very effective and viruses slipped into their LAN and started taking control of some PCs. Hundreds of infected mails started floating around the LAN and was also going out to customers and vendors. Several mails started bouncing back from unknown addresses.

And finally, one fine morning, all e-mail traffic going to their SMTP mail server (at the hosting company's data center in the USA) got blocked. After struggling for two days with the problem, they finally found out that all the traffic going to port 25 of the CompanyX.com SMTP server was being blocked at a particular American ISP's router on the way to the hosting company's data center. This had happened because of the high volume traffic of virus-infected mails being generated form this domain, CompanyX.com, had triggered some BlackLists (BlockLists) being used by the ISP.

By the time the blockage was removed, Company X must have lost a lot of business opportunities and its reputation with the customers and vendors would have been at stake as well.

Ways to shield against Spam mail
There are many commercial and free blacklists available today of IP addresses, which have been detected as sources of spam and viruses. Not only ISPs, but also many companies subscribe to such lists and block e-mails originating from such IP addresses. It is not necessary that such blocked mails will be bounced back to the sender. They may also get deleted on the recipient mail server. In such a case you may think that the other person has not responded to your mail, whereas the mail itself has not reached him.

Almost a month after this Blacklisting episode, Company X is still struggling to find a solution provider with the right solution for their problem, which, I think, is hounding many other companies. The big names in messaging solutions have never bothered to respond to inquiries form company X, while small and medium size solution providers have offered quite a variety of confusing solutions. There is a market to be tapped, but it needs to be educated by solution providers.

Spreading Spam awareness imperative
The Company X in the case study given above took two days to find out from someone about the Traceroute utility, which can give you a trace of how your SMTP traffic is going from the outgoing mail server to the SMTP server at the hosting company's data center. The trace done from a Linux-based machine finally pinpointed the ISP location, which had blocked the traffic, and another search on the ISP gave the relevant e-mail contact address at the ISP where this matter could be taken up for removing the blockage. A person at the hosting company in the US admitted (off
the record!) that they consider servers and domains from Asia to be high risk ones and ISPs may block them for security reasons.

One must remember, Cyberspace is going through almost uncontrolled growth and one must take care to remain safe. Extreme actions generate extreme reactions. It is important not to get caught between the crossfire. If the good people in Cyberspace don't keep their servers well protected and their e-mail traffic clean by keeping away bad people, who are a very small minority thriving on the ignorance and carelessness of the good people, the Cyberspace is going to get Bad and Ugly. Your e-mail traffic may need a 'Visa' in the future to travel to mail servers in different countries around the globe!

Ashok Dongre is an independent consultant

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