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June 10, 2004

University Launches Attack on Computer Viruses, Spam

Tired of unsolicited junk e-mail clogging your inbox with promises of getting rich, refinancing your mortgage (whether you have one or not) or increasing your penis size (whether you have one or not)?
E-mail is becoming an endangered communication vehicle, some computer industry experts say, because users increasingly are so turned off by unsolicited messages they are avoiding e-mail entirely.
But Pitt has done something about the annoying, omnipresent bulk e-mail known as spam. While employees and students were sleeping last Saturday, Pitt’s Computing Services and Systems Development (CSSD) personnel were installing a new spam and virus e-mail filtering service, now available to all Pitt e-mail users.
Industry estimates project that 40 – 80 percent of the more than 40 billion e-mails sent worldwide daily are spam.
But what constitutes spam is in the eye of the beholder. So Pitt has purchased software that flags spam but does not immediately delete it, allowing users two weeks to judge for themselves, according to CSSD director Jinx Walton.
The new service, which also is designed to protect Pitt users against e-mail viruses, is the product of Postini, Inc., a California-based provider of e-mail security and management solutions that protect e-mail infrastructure by preventing spam and virus attacks from reaching an enterprise gateway, in Pitt’s case the primary e-mail inbox.
The Postini spam and virus e-mail filter scans all incoming e-mail addressed to a University computer account (username@pitt.edu).
(A caution: The software does not filter e-mail sent to other accounts Pitt employees and students may have, such as personal e-mail accounts or departmental accounts, e.g., username@cssd.pitt.edu, Walton said. However, messages forwarded to a University account will be filtered by the service. The service soon will be available for departmental e-mail addresses as well, Walton said, which requires the filters to be installed on departmental servers.)
E-mails suspected of being spam or containing a virus are “quarantined” in the main window of the user’s “Message Center,” a gadget (link) that can be accessed through my.pitt.edu. (My.pitt.edu is the University’s web portal service that allows Pitt users to customize their view of the University’s various web sites and services in addition to commonly used Internet-based services.)
Once connected, the message center is linked uniquely to the user’s portal home page, known as “My Page.” Thus, messages quarantined in the message center are secure, that is, accessible only by the authorized user or a message center administrator.
The e-mail addressee is notified by the filtering service that an incoming e-mail is suspicious. (See sidebar.) Messages remain in the message center for 14 days and then are deleted automatically.
“No [filtering] system is fool-proof,” Walton acknowledged. “We carefully evaluated all of these solutions that were out there. Some solutions did delete messages right away; some delivered them to your mailbox marked spam, but messages were still going to your mailbox. This solution gives you that two-week period. It notifies you that spam is there, and it filters for viruses too. During that two weeks you can view your messages in the message center and forward any messages you want to keep directly to your inbox, or you can delete them from there,” Walton said. “It’s fairly intuitive and straightforward to use.”
The quarantine function allows users to open messages with suspected viruses in the message center without danger of spreading the virus to their computer, she added.
The virus filtering service has been installed on all University computer accounts and cannot be de-activated by Pitt users, Walton said. But users are required to activate the spam filtering service manually through the Pitt web portal (my.pitt.edu).
To get started on the new filtering service, visit my.pitt.edu, click the “What’s New” tab and follow the instructions for accessing the message center and activating the spam filtering service.
Once the message center gadget has been connected to the user’s Pitt portal homepage, known as “My Page,” users should:
* Go to the message center site and click on “Junk Email Settings” at the top of the window. Clicking on the On button below the “Junk Email Blocking” heading activates the spam filter.
* Go to “Spam Filter” to select the specific categories of junk e-mail that they want to be blocked by the filter. The categories are: sexually explicit, get rich quick, special offers and racially insensitive or hate-oriented topics.
* Personalize their level of protection against spam by choosing one of five progressive settings ranging from lenient to aggressive within each category. More aggressive settings will catch more spam, but have a greater potential to quarantine legitimate e-mail as spam.
“People are going to be a little bit nervous about using the aggressive setting right away, because they think they might miss legitimate mail,” Walton predicted. “But the thing I’m happy about is that you still have the chance to look at your messages. I think people will probably start ‘in the ‘middle of the road’ and gradually get more aggressive as they become more familiar with the service. But the settings can be changed at any time.”
The key is to check the message center periodically for quarantined messages, she said.
Users can further customize their spam filtering desires by using the “Approved Senders” list and “Blocked Senders” list functions, Walton said. Users designate individual e-mail addresses for their approved senders list by manually entering the addresses. Mail sent from these addresses automatically bypasses the spam filter and is delivered to the receiver’s inbox. (Messages with suspected viruses sent from approved senders still will be flagged by the virus filter.)
If a user has given a pitt.edu account address to a store because he or she wants to hear about any special offers, for example, adding the store’s e-mail address to the approved senders list keeps that address from being trapped as spam.
Similarly, the blocked senders list allows users to designate e-mail addresses manually that always will be quarantined by the filter, regardless of content. (This function has its limitations because spammers often change their e-mail addresses to avoid being trapped by such lists.)
These lists are accessed from the message center’s “Junk Email Settings” link.
Walton said that Pitt signed a three-year contract with Postini, which boasts over 3,300 company clients. “Postini claims to trap 95 percent of spam,” she said. “Using the aggressive setting, I think it’s more like 99 percent or higher for spam. For viruses, they also say they trap 95 percent. So, people still need to use anti-viral software, as a precaution, to be safe.”
Walton declined to say how much Pitt is paying Postini for the spam and virus e-mail filtering service.
“We deliver about 13 million e-mails a month, and we do start to see things slow down as mail increases,” she said. “I don’t want to have to keep investing money to expand our capacity just so we can deliver spam faster. So that’s one of the advantages of using Postini, because that spam is not being stored on our system. It’s really being stored by them.”
John Close, chair of the Senate computer usage committee and a member of the provost’s Council on Academic Computing, said those groups heartily endorsed the new e-mail filtering service. “For everything we saw and heard about this service, where users can customize their settings, where there is user notification and where there is the two-week period to find [any legitimate] mail, we think this is a good solution to the spam problem. And this fits in with what I was saying in the recent University Times Senate Matters column, that individual users need to take more responsibility for their own computers.” (See May 13 University Times.)
Walton said that informational brochures on the filtering service will be distributed to all faculty and staff via campus mail in the near future. For more information on the service, contact the Help Desk at 4-4357.
-Peter Hart


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