Proofpoint provides a Secure Email Gateway solution that helps over 4,000 companies protect and govern their most sensitive data. Proofpoint, positioned by Gartner in the Leaders Quadrant in its 2011 Magic Quadrant for Secure Email Gateways, delivers an integrated suite of on-demand data protection solutions spanning threat management, regulatory compliance, data governance and secure communications—all of which are based on a common security-as-a-service platform.

Patented and unparalleled technology puts Proofpoint in a class by itself. Proofpoint MLX™ machine learning, the application of big data analytics and the use of global threat correlation systems deliver unrivalled anti-spam and data loss prevention accuracy. DoubleBlind™ Encryption ensures the complete security of archived email and other data. High-speed search technologies enable rapid discovery with guaranteed performance.

Leveraging big data analytics, deep content inspection and machine learning, Proofpoint detects and stops targeted “spear phishing” and other advanced attacks more effectively than competing alternatives. By processing and modeling billions of messages per day, big-data analytics allow Proofpoint to spot anomalies in traffic flow to detect targeted attacks.

Proofpoint’s broad set of solutions—including Proofpoint Enterprise Protection, Proofpoint Enterprise Privacy and Proofpoint Enterprise Archive—spans threat protection, compliance, governance and secure communications. These solutions enable organizations to:

Keep malicious content out of their environments
Prevent the theft or inadvertent loss of sensitive information
Collect, securely retain, govern and discover sensitive data for compliance and litigation support and
Securely communicate and collaborate on sensitive data with customers, partners and suppliers.

Proofpoint Platform

Proofpoint’s products are powered by the Proofpoint CloudControl platform in order to meet the demands of enterprise customers who are looking to reduce their operating expenses without having to sacrifice email security, control, flexibility, or scalability. See the diagram above.

With Proofpoint’s platform, organizations have the flexibility to deploy email security and compliance in a way that makes the most sense to them – from pure cloud to hybrid deployments that take advantage of existing virtualization infrastructure. Proofpoint offers a secure, extensible cloud platform that ensures email security and compliance for enterprise content. It includes shared (cloud) services and an infrastructure designed for high scalability that provides economies of scale, delivering the lowest total cost of ownership while still supporting both public and private cloud deployments. In addition, advanced analytic tools leverage the network for automated monitoring and rapid assessment of emerging threats.

Proofpoint Enterprise Protection

Proofpoint Enterprise Protection provides the industry’s most comprehensive threat classification and management solution against phish, virus, spam, and other email borne malware. Backed by the patented MLX Threat Classification Engine, enterprise emails are classified based on the level of security threat to an organization and managed accordingly, whether it is valid email, nuisance spam, or malicious, low-volume phishing attacks. Real-time message tracing provide the necessary tools to triage any attack and our solution is backed by an enterprise-class support organization focused on supporting your mission critical communications.

Phishing Protection and Management

Today’s enterprise email security threats no longer consist of just nuisance spam. Attackers with malicious intents are increasingly using email as an entry vector through the use of phishing messages. Historically, phishing was focused on capturing individual account credentials, but recent email attacks have shown that phishing attacks have a broader target in mind: corporate intellectual property and sensitive and confidential business information.

An even more sinister type of phishing is the “spear-phishing” message. Rather than casting out thousands of emails in a broad-based attack, spear-phishing attacks are highly targeted at specific groups of people, or even individuals within an organization. The attackers will typically gather some insider information to create spear-phishing emails containing relevant topics. This is achieved by combing through public press releases, blogs, and social networking sites. As a result of the highly convincing email created with such background information, spear-phishing emails have an even higher rate at which victims fall for these counterfeit messages.

Phishing Protection and Management Key Capabilities:

Contextual, Lexical Analysis: Proofpoint MLX examines the content and context of messages using structural tests, malicious URL detection, as well as targeted rules for phishing attacks to accurately single out phishing messages from nuisance spam.
Specialized Phishing Quarantines: Phishing messages are designed to fool recipients into believing they are valid messages, convincing them to take a call to action. Due to the malicious nature of phishing messages, they are placed in a specialized quarantine, which prevents end-users from access and taking action upon one, putting your organization at risk. Many alternative email filtering solutions do not uniquely identify phishing messages, and when they are filtered, simply place the messages into the spam quarantine, in full view of an end-user, who can easily release these messages, immediately compromising the security of your organization.

Proofpoint Spam Protection

Spam remains a serious problem today because it continues to be a very profitable business for spammers. Spam takes on various forms from adult content, selling products/services, pharmaceuticals to stock promotions, job offers, etc. These unsolicited messages are a nuisance and can also be offensive to your end-users (particularly adult content). Spammers are constantly pioneering new techniques to bypass email filters forcing organizations to invest in anti-spam solutions that can keep up with the evolving approaches. As long as spam makes money, spammers will continue to send out a barrage of unsolicited messages.

Proofpoint Spam Protection Key Capabilities:

Contextual, Lexical, and Image-based Analysis and Support for Single-Byte and Double-Byte Languages: Proofpoint MLX technology examines the content and context of messages using structural tests, single-byte and double-byte language content inspection, pornographic detection, malicious URL detection, image analysis, reputation analysis and any custom policies administrators have defined.
Bounce Management: Backscatter: The barrage of non-delivery report messages (NDRs) and auto-responses caused by spammers spoofing an organization’s email addresses – has long been a serious problem for most organizations. Proofpoint supports the latest BATV (Bounce Address Tag Validation) specification to tag outbound messages and to validate incoming NDRs against those tags to block backscatter. In addition, Proofpoint MLX techniques block invalid NDRs in cases where BATV isn’t or can’t be used (e.g., in the case of email forwarded from external domains).
Administrator Customization: Different anti-spam email policies can easily be configured for different groups of end-users or domains. All anti-spam email policies can be customized at a global, group, or user level with full integration to LDAP or Active Directory to simplify on-going administration.
Outstanding End-User Control of Anti-Spam Preferences: Proofpoint provides end-users with easy, “self-service” control over their personal anti-spam preferences through features including:

Personalized spam quarantines and quarantine digest reports
Personalized safelists and blocklists. (Global lists override end-user lists)
Web-based spam quarantine and profile administration
Ability to opt in and out of different spam policies (as permitted by administrator-configurable settings)

Multi-language Support: End-user interfaces for message digests and web-based quarantine are available in Chinese, Dutch, English, German, Finnish, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

Virus Protection

Proofpoint’s Virus Protection provides signature-based anti-virus technologies through strategic partnerships with leading anti-virus vendors, giving customers a choice of enterprise-class email anti-virus solutions. These world-class anti-virus engines are the same as those used in their respective commercial products, ensuring that an organization is strongly protected against dangerous viruses and other types of malicious code.

Dynamic Email Reputation Services

Proofpoint Dynamic Reputation is the industry’s most powerful connection management service. Proofpoint Dynamic Reputation service provides enterprises with an accurate, first line of defense against spam, directory harvest attacks, denial-of-service and other email-borne, attacks, while delivering substantial bandwidth savings.

Proofpoint Dynamic Reputation Key Capabilities:

Multi-layered protection with global and local reputation: Leveraging visibility into the industry’s largest volume of email per day, global reputation ensures defense against IP addresses as soon as they appear. Local reputation ensures defense against IP addresses that are targeted at one specific organization that may not immediately appear on a global scale.
Accurate IP Reputation: Hundreds of reputation-related attributes are analyzed for each connection, providing extraordinary accuracy. Reputation related attributes include:

SPF
Percentage of spam, virus, phish, and invalid recipients associated with an IP
URL and domain block lists
DHCP addresses (zombies, botnets)
Image history (fuzzy matching)
Recipient list sizes

Reduces email resource requirements: Blocks up to 80% of inbound SMTP connections with less than a one in one million false positive rate.
Rapid Refresh Rate: Collecting information on millions of IP addresses, Proofpoint MLX continually parses hundreds of data points for each IP address in real-time to generate extremely timely, accurate network reputation scores. Scores are updated every minute as the reputation service reacts to new spam and other malicious sources – an order of magnitude faster than competing email reputation solutions.

Zero-Hour Threat Detection

As more malicious email attacks take on the form of low-volume targeted attacks, the issue of zero-hour threats is greater than ever. Emerging email security threats via low-volume, targeted attacks are more common now than ever – designed to remain undetected for as long as possible. The need to identify suspicious email messages early in the outbreak cycle is critical.

Proofpoint Zero-Hour Threat Detection protects enterprises against new email security threats, such as phishing attacks and viruses as they emerge. This adds an additional layer of security threat detection over the Spam Detection, Phishing Protection, and Virus Protection layers, providing critical defense-in-depth protection.

Email Firewall

Proofpoint’s Email Firewall is a real-time content filtering layer that allows enterprises to define and enforce acceptable-use policies for message content and email attachments. These features can be used to identify and prevent a wide variety of inbound and outbound email policy violations, including offensive language, harassment, file sharing and much more.

Proofpoint Email Firewall Key Capabilities:

Connection-Level Defense: Provides a stateful, first-line of defense by testing numerous connection-level data points, including DNS, MX record verification, Sender-Policy Framework (SPF), and recipient verification.
Message Abuse Prevention: Proofpoint Email Firewall includes common filters and standard dictionaries to quickly establish corporate email messaging policies or support existing policies, giving organizations an immediate benefit in proactively controlling the most frequently encountered issues with messaging abuse. Rules can compare message content with dictionaries in order to protect businesses from the use of inappropriate or offensive content and other issues that can surface through email usage. A variety of built-in dictionaries are supplied, such as an offensive language dictionary that can be employed to discourage the use of improper or abusive language.
Enforced Corporate Email Policies: Custom email security policies are easily created within a graphical administrative interface, which allows email messages to be analyzed and processed, based on a comprehensive list of message attributes:

Attachment attributes: File size, filename, file extension, number of files, number of files in archive, file depth in archive, presence of protected files and presence of corrupt archives
Message attributes: Text in message body, dictionary scores, message size, presence of encryption, MIME type and HTML tags
Message header, envelope and routing attributes: Email headers, envelope recipient, envelope sender, sender hostname, sender IP address, recipient, number of recipients, DNS block list status, message route (e.g., inbound or outbound) and more.
System attributes: Total concurrent connections, total connections and total messages.
Recipient group membership: Different policies can be defined and enforced for different groups of users or domains. As with all of Proofpoint’s email security policy enforcement features, policies can be defined at the global, group, or individual end-user level.

Localized Policy Enforcement: Policy and content scanning engines detect and ‘understand’ text in any language, including multi-byte languages. Acceptable use policies can match non-English keywords and dictionary terms written in international character sets such as Japanese, Chinese and Cyrillic.

Quarantine Folders by Threat

Simply identifying spam, phish, virus, and other email-borne malware is only part of the solution. When malicious emails such as a phishing emails are quarantined alongside nuisance spam and made available to end-users via an end-user quarantine, security is now out of your hands and in the hands of each and every individual recipient.

Proofpoint provides individual quarantine folders for each type of threat, allowing administrators to allow individuals access to nuisance spam via a web-based end-user quarantine, or regularly scheduled digests containing a list of all blocked messages. Messages that pose a malicious threat or security risk can be handled uniquely.

Smart Search: Real-Time Message Tracing

Trying to track down a specific email message or identify a set of recipients of a particular phishing attack across your messaging infrastructure is almost like searching for a needle in a haystack. Quickly consolidating email message logs and ensuring real-time availability is a challenge many organizations have.

Proofpoint Smart Search provides real-time advanced email message tracing with forensic and log analysis. Logs are quickly consolidated across all Proofpoint systems – even across globally deployed clusters – and indexed for rapid search. Log analysis information is continuously updated so that within minutes, details about any email message can be found through the easy-to-use Smart Search interface.

Proofpoint Smart Search Key Capabilities:

Message Tracing: When an executive asks the helpdesk what happened to an important message that was never received by a business partner, Proofpoint Smart Search can quickly track and locate the message and report its delivery status.
Investigation: Has an end user been exchanging email with a competitor? Identify the subjects of those email messages.
Forensics: The legal department can track and identify specifically when and which server an important notification was delivered.
Compliance: Quickly find all messages related to a specific compliance incident or an entire class of violations. Identify which rules were triggered and how the messages were routed as a result.
Trend Analysis: Determine how many email messages triggered a specific Proofpoint rule over a specific period of time.
Empowered Help Desk Staff: Provide help desk personnel with access to only the Smart Search module, enabling them to answer common email troubleshooting and investigation requests.

Proofpoint Enterprise Privacy

Proofpoint Enterprise Privacy provides powerful data loss protection and encryption capabilities – the easiest and most cost-effective way for organizations to prevent leaks of sensitive data. Powerful policies help organizations protect email data based on the role of specific users.

Advanced, deep content analysis monitors and classifies both structured and unstructured data, ensuring that all sensitive information is protected. And once sensitive information is found, flexible workflow allows that content to be blocked or to automatically leverage Proofpoint Encryption – the best-in-class email encryption solution available today, supporting both desktop and mobile users with an optimized mobile experience. Real-time message tracing provide the necessary tools to triage any incident and DLP dashboard provide an overview of all current incidents and trends at a glance.

Privacy Policy Enforcement

Proofpoint Enterprise Privacy contains a number of pre-built email policies that represent both best practices for corporate data protection as well as a number of regulatory requirements, such and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) for healthcare organizations and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) for retailers and processors of credit card transactions. Trigger conditions are transparent to administrators, who can easily customize and tune any email policy quickly and easily to adapt to the organization’s unique environment.

In addition, Proofpoint policies are Identity- and Device-aware.

Email Encryption: SaaS-powered, Policy-based Encryption

Proofpoint Encryption offers powerful, policy-based email encryption features that mitigate the risks associated with regulatory violations, data loss and corporate policy violations, without adversely impacting business operations. Proofpoint Encryption is ideal for any organization that needs to protect sensitive email data, while still making it readily available to appropriate affiliates, business partners and end users—on their desktops and mobile devices.

Proofpoint Privacy Data Management Solutions

Sensitive data exists in a broad range of forms for any organization. From the personal information managed by the HR department to the confidential documents of intellectual property, data management and analysis solutions need to account for the varying types of information, all of which need to be protected.

Proofpoint Enterprise Privacy effectively manages both structured and unstructured data with ease. Basic corporate policies can be handled as well advanced deep content analysis based on structured data such as protected health information (PHI) or primary account numbers (PAN) and unstructured data such as confidential documents. Policies can be set based on the data being detected, then addressed accordingly.

Proofpoint Privacy Protocol

Proofpoint Enterprise Privacy is not only capable of filtering email traffic (SMTP), but leveraging the ICAP protocol and any ICAP compatible web-proxy, the same policies and advanced detection capabilities can be extended to web (HTTP) protocols, covering leakage from vectors such as webmail or blog posts.

Proofpoint Privacy Incident Manager

Detecting the data is only the first step in a data protection strategy. Once a message containing sensitive or confidential data has been detected and triggers a policy, remediation actions need to be taken. Providing flexibility in remediation allows an organization to evolve to meet changing regulations. But administrators don’t need to bear the brunt of data loss remediation themselves. Studies have shown that the vast majority of data loss is non-malicious and inadvertent. So, allowing end users to perform self-remediation can be more efficient as well as reducing the burden that administrators must bear in addressing incidents.

Proofpoint Privacy Reporting

Data protection policies need to be updated on a regular basis. Detailed reporting is critical so that compliance officers have a clear picture of the frequency of the types of data that are triggering policies to drive policy revisions as well as determine the need for additional end user training.

In addition to data loss preventative tools, Proofpoint Enterprise Privacy also provides response tools that are critical to any data protection strategy. Dashboards provide an overview of the current incidents, while reports may provide insight into policies that need to be updated or additional end user training that may be needed. Real-time message tracing with Proofpoint Smart Search provide the diagnostic tools required when tracking down specific messages and/or incidents.

Proofpoint Enterprise Archive

Proofpoint Enterprise Archive™ is an on-demand email archiving solution that addresses three key challenges— legal discovery, SEC/FINRA compliance and end user email management—without the headaches of managing email archiving in-house. With an innovative, next-generation architecture, it can be up and running in days with no upfront capital investment, and low, predictable lifetime cost. Proofpoint Enterprise Archive can be utilized for search anytime-anywhere with sustainably fast, reliable performance uniquely backed by a Search Performance Guarantee.

Proofpoint Enterprise Archive utilizes the Microsoft Exchange journaling process to archive all internal and external email messages. Email messages are archived according to retention periods defined within Proofpoint’s policy engine so that information is available for end user access, legal discovery, and regulatory compliance purposes. Proofpoint Enterprise Archive integrates easily with both on-premises Microsoft Exchange servers as well as hosted Exchange deployments, including Microsoft Office 365. Both models provide trusted integration to messaging resources through the use of Proofpoint’s patented DoubleBlind Encryption™ to maintain the security and privacy of customer information at all times. Encrypted messages are then securely transmitted to the Proofpoint Network, which provides a fully managed cloud service infrastructure to ensure that information is always available for immediate search and retrieval by end users, compliance supervisors, legal users, and administrators.

If you have a question or a comment, or would like more information or a demonstration, please let us know by completing the Contact Us box on the upper right side of this page.

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