ARTICLE

Law Technology News -- October 2005

Security Spotlight: Is it Time to Upgrade Your Spam Filters

Unwanted e-mail, such as spam and phishing messages, poses significant liability, productivity and resource issues for legal organizations, including challenges to client privacy and legal services.

Is it time to upgrade your anti-spam arsenal? Consider:

  • How much time do you spend ensuring that no "false positives" (legitimate
    business e-mails quarantined as "spam") are quarantined?
  • How much time is spent by attorneys, or other staff, searching for client emails
    that were never received, or somehow got lost among spam? What's the
    hourly billing rate of the recipient?

All anti-spam defense measures pose the inherent risk of delaying or preventing time-sensitive communications from reaching attorneys and clients. Failure to block unwanted spam poses an equally unacceptable risk. No attorney can afford either a missed e-mail communication or the hours spent digging up missing e-mails.

It may be time to upgrade. Here are some factors to consider as you evaluate your options:

  1. Identifying and blocking spam: No single technique is sufficient to stop the constantly morphing forms of spam. Many older anti-spam tools rely on
    keywords or rigid scoring methods. Unfortunately, these too easily block
    legitimate e-mail communications, especially if your firm works on issues of a contractual, sexual or financial nature, because most spam uses contractual,
    sexual or financial language. Look for software that uses a combination of
    techniques and technologies. A "cocktail" approach generates higher
    identification rates and fewer false positives. Useful features include sender identification, pattern matching, black/white listing, heuristics, content
    filtering, community input, decoy accounts, and regular updates of pattern files
    and scanning algorithms for maximum accuracy.
  2. Phishing Expeditions: Phishing is fraudulent e-mail designed to look like legitimate business correspondence, so it can easily elude spam filters.
    Look for programs that address this type of malware.
  3. Integration: Your anti-spam technology should integrate smoothly within your anti-virus defenses and other programs to cach "spyware" and "pharming"
    (both variations of spam and viruses).
  4. Easy administration: Your system should need minimal handholding by your IT staff, for both maintenance and quarantine management.
  5. Educate and empower your users: While technical analysis is important to identify spam, employees also need to be able to personalize e-mail filtering
    to fit their own needs. One person's spam is another person's treasure.
  6. Reports: Do you need reports on captured spam or phishing provided to individual users? This can be handy if you want your users to have more control over their own mail. This way, your IT team spends less time looking for blocked e-mail, reducing costs and allowing you to focus on other business projects.

Michael Libby is the information systems director of Downey Brand, based in Sacramento, Calif. E-mail: mlibby@downeybrand.com

Law Technology News October 2005