Red Condor Message Assurance Gateway

In July 2006, GSU deployed the Red Condor Message Assurance Gateway (MAG) - 3000 email security system. Red Condor is a Managed Service Provider of comprehensive email security solutions that eliminate spam, viruses, spyware, phishing schemes, and offensive content - dynamic, living threats to GSU's security and productivity.

Since the installation of Red Condor, GSU faculty, staff and students have seen a marked improvement in their email experience. The quantity of spam and junk mail is dramatically reduced, email delivery time is shorter and more consistent, and students are able to manage their mail accounts and stay below their disk quotas because they are not being barraged by spam night and day.

Six anti-spam/anti-virus products were reviewed during the vendor selection process prior to selecting Red Condor. Ultimately, it was Red Condor's combination of security, service, and simplicity that were the deciding factors. The Red Condor Message Assurance Gateway delivers high-performance, comprehensive email security backed by 24x7x365 managed service.

ITS was very interested in the Zero Administration capability of the Red Condor system. We were constantly watching for spam on our previous solution and having to devise ways to keep it from coming through. We were spending countless hours a week fighting spam. Red Condor's Zero Administration assures that someone else is implementing spam/virus prevention best practices on GSU's mail stream.

The Red Condor Message Assurance Gateway is a perimeter defense system that filters incoming email before it reaches the GSU mail servers. Red Condor's Adaptive Threat Detection technology provides real-time behavior-based perimeter defense against distributed denial of service (DDoS) and dictionary harvest attacks (DHA) that does not impact the transfer of legitimate email. Unlike traditional solutions that rely on black lists, rate-limiters, and other brute-force methods to protect the domain from service attacks, the Red Condor solution gathers real-time awareness of spam campaigns and implements a feedback driven response appropriate to the abusiveness of the attack.

Once an email message is accepted by the Red Condor perimeter defense layer, it is passed to the Message Analysis Engine proprietary computational technology influenced by Human-in-the-Loop analysis that provides dynamic and successive filtering until the message intent is clear. Two independent virus filter engines are used, as well as a judicious use of many filters and defense techniques that collectively block malicious and fraudulent email with near certainty. This unique application of fraud message filters result in near-zero false positives, and does not require initial filter training or ongoing tuning. Mailbox owners do not need to report spam or develop individual rules. The spam problem simply disappears.