Protecting Your Network Bandwidth

Simple fact – in Mongolia Internet bandwidth is very expensive. The Internet is a wonderful tool for our companies, organizations, schools, and personal life. The utility of Internet is really changing the way we live and do business, however it clearly comes with a high cost.

Some applications, such as Kazaa (a peer-to-peer application allowing network-based transfer of large, multimedia files such as MP3s and video), consume a tremendous amount of network resource. For a company or organization paying the high price of bandwidth to connect your office to the Internet, losing your network resource to users who are downloading multi-media entertainment is very expensive.

In this article MagicNet reviews a couple very simple ideas network managers can use to lesson the impact of network abuse from both user downloads, as well as from electronic mail abuse (SPAM). Click for the full story

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The highest single cost component for an Internet Service Provider is international bandwidth. Unfortunately, this cost must be passed to users – which in many cases in Mongolia makes the cost of Internet connection too expensive. For companies which do have the benefit of dedicated Internet access, in some cases internal users are to cause of extremely heavy bandwidth usage, and much of that usage may not be job related.

MultiMedia and Entertainment Abuse on the Organizational Network

In the past couple years many new network-based applications have emerged, such as streaming video, peer-to-peer file sharing (Napster, Kazaa, etc), video conferencing, and other applications with high bandwidth requirements. Many of these applications were written with the intent of providing multi-media entertainment and application file sharing among other users having access to broadband networks. In those countries with widely available broadband Internet over Cable TV and low cost ADSL, the network supporting those multimedia applications have very high capacity within their own network, as well as high speed connections to other national networks.

Example countries with very high performance broadband infrastructure include the USA, Korea, Sweden, and UK. In those countries it is very easy to obtain broadband connections to the home, and have a single PC downloading large multimedia files.

In Mongolia we have very good local network infrastructure, however most multimedia content requires access to an international location. Thus if you have a company with a 64kbps Internet connection, and there are 3 people downloading large multimedia files at the same time, you could easily run into congestion on your network, or 100% bandwidth utilization. Currently, Kazaa appears to be the application most abused within corporate or organizational networks.

To protect your Internet investment, network managers or organizational policy makers can take some definite actions:  Write and deliver a network access policy statement to all network users. Clearly state in the policy what type of activity is acceptable using organizational resources, and let the user know what will happen if they abuse those resources.  Consider denying users access to abusive applications. It is relatively easy to block applications on the network. MagicNet can assist network managers in understanding what can be done to protect your network, and assist in configurations if needed.

MagicNet does not believe that users should be prevented from taking full advantage of Internet applications and services – we believe that company or organizational resources should be available when needed to meet company objectives, and whenever possible limit the cost of access through effective resource management.

We all see it – those messages that appear in your inbox every day of the week, with unsolicited advertising and from people you don’t know. There is an entire industry working to mass deliver advertising through the Internet. Marketing companies will use a lot of methods to learn your email address, as well as understand your interests.

Once a mass mailer has your personal address and other information, they will start selling your email address to other mass mailing lists, and your mailbox starts filling with “junk” email. The industry calls this unsolicited mail “SPAM.” It is costing our industry millions of dollars a year in wasted bandwidth, as well as filling disk systems with unproductive garbage.

The international community is working hard to prevent SPAM. In some countries, such as the USA, there is active legislation to prevent SPAMers from using the Internet to send unsolicited email. Thus the mass mailers must get more creative in their planning to get around legislation, and efforts by the community to stop their business. One way for them to get around laws in countries where SPAM is illegal is to find a mail server in another country with poor security, and then transmit their mail via that server. This is called mail relay.

For a commercial company such as MagicNet, we protect our network from mail relay by not allowing anybody to send mail from our network without being physically present on an address within MagicNet. Thus, even if you have a mail account such as [email protected], and sending mail from your office in Ulaanbaatar is easy, you could not send mail via our mail server (pop.magicnet.mn) if you were dialed into our network from Seoul. The only exception is through your web mail account – which is actually sending mail from a server within magicNet’s network.

However SPAMers – generally being very sophisticated telecom engineers, still find mail servers with poor security, and use those mail server to relay their SPAM. You might also note that if the SPAMer is able to get into your mail server, you may actually have a much larger security problem in your network.

There are many “open” servers within Mongolia, and in some cases the international Internet community has stopped accepting email messages from any network with the domain XXXXX.mn. When a mail server relay is found open, word of that open relay makes it around the Internet SPAM community pretty fast, and your server is then at risk. Thus, SPAM not only fills your mailbox with unwanted mail, it also creates a security risk, as well as filling up that expensive 64kbps Internet access pipe you have with MagicNet or other networks.

So, if you are an organization or company operating your own mail server, what can you do? Easiest thing is to ensure your network is secure, and then ensure your mail server has turned off the option for mail relay. While you may still have some extremely persistent mass-mailing experts find a way into your system, stopping relay from outside of your internal network will solve about 90% of your potential SPAM relay problems.

On the User Side

There are several commercial mail filtering packages that work with clients such as Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape mail, and Eudora. Here are a few examples (with info from their marketing materials) of commercial client SPAM filtering applications:

 SpamAssassin Pro works as an integral part of Microsoft™ Outlook 2000/XP to filter out unwanted spam e-mail. The unwanted e-mail is not lost or deleted, SpamAssassin Pro creates an Outlook folder called ''Junk Mail'' for you and filters spam into this folder. ''Spam'' is unsolicited commercial e-mail. When you get e-mail from people or companies that you don't know, offering goods/services/information that you don't like or want, that e-mail is called ''spam''. SpamAssassin Pro keeps spam out of your Outlook Inbox.  MailFrontier software products protect users’ mailboxes proactively, automatically learning about people and topics that are important to them and devising a set of dynamic, personalized preferences. Leveraging a combination of wide-ranging blacklists, intelligent content filters, a global reporting network, and a groundbreaking sender verification process, MailFrontier is uniquely positioned to guard mailboxes from junk email.  MailWasher is a freeware program designed to remove spam, viruses and unwanted attachments from your e-mail before they get to your computer. MailWasher connects to your e-mail server(s) then retrieves and displays information about the e-mails waiting for you. Aided by MailWasher's inbuilt processing tools, you can then decide what to do with each individual e-mail - download, delete, or bounce it back to the sender. MailWasher deletes unwanted messages at the server, without downloading them - or it can bounce an e-mail back to the sender so that it looks as though your address is not valid, making the spammer think you don't exist.

On the server side many SPAM filters are now entering the market to clean SPAM before it gets to the client mailbox. Even with server side filters, this does not solve the problem of messages being sent to users. Installing a client side SPAM filter does take a bit of skill, thus adding some training requirements for users.

Conclusions

MagicNet fully understands the high cost of international communications and network access. We are constantly trying to find ways to reduce user costs, and have done a pretty good job during the past year to reduce access fees. A company or organization can control their network costs by carefully managing both the types of applications used on organizational resources, as well as ensuring mail systems are closed and protected from use or intrusion by SPAMers. Contact the MagicNet sales team if you would like our assistance in reviewing or correcting applications and mail security.