Many new regulations call for stronger passwords. We have found many small and medium size businesses never change their passwords. It is this type of trusting culture that makes small businesses a great place to work. However, things like passwords in the hands of the wrong person can be used to access your data from outside the company.

It is important, and often required by a regulation now, to change your password on a regular basis and to use a strong password. The best passwords utilize letters, numbers, and special characters. Passwords that use all or part of a name or passwords with only letters tend to be the weakest.

In order to help users select a strong password, Microsoft provides a tool on their website. Please use this link to access the tool:

Here is a link to a Microsoft article on creating strong passwords:

Yesterday I was helping a client restore a missing inbox folder and I noticed an email that was entitled “****SPAM**** Angelina Jolie’s Free Video”. It appeared to have been sent from someone in the organization so I did not pay much attention. The ****SPAM**** flag showed up because the McAfee Spam Filter had decided this email contained unwanted content. Microsoft still routed it to the user’s inbox because the “From” address was a local user.

I did not think much more about the message until I found several versions of the same message in my inbox and one appeared to come from our own “info” email address.

How can you verify the real sender without opening the email? Just highlight the message – just one click – then using the Right Hand mouse button, click the message and a small menu pops up. From this menu select “Options” or “Message Options” depending on what version of Outlook you have. When the next window pops up you will see a box at the bottom entitled “Internet Headers”. You can scroll through the header information but the key information we are looking for is near the top. Here is what my headers show:

Received: from mario-ea97e1d71 ([77.27.10.69]) by actco.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.3959)

As you can see, the email came from mario-ea97e1d71 located at the IP address 77.27.10.69 and not a local user. Typically, email sent locally on a Microsoft Exchange server will have no header information. This is a message you will want to delete.

You need to educate your users not to follow the links on these types of emails. If they initiate a download by following a link and start clicking “OKAY” they can bypass filtering and actually give malware permission to install itself if they have local Administrator rights.

Many clients take for granted the spam and firewall filtering that is already in place. Every so often I will have a client ask, “How do we know it is really working?” I can tell you from experience, I usually get a call within the hour if a client’s spam filtering stops working, but here is how to check.

On your Exchange Server locate McAfee Group Shield for Exchange. This may be located on the McAfee Menu or the Network Associates Menu depending on the version and when it was installed.

Once the program is launched a menu is displayed on the left-hand side. Select “Detected Items”. On the latest version the logs are set by default to only track the last 1,000 messages. I have a small number of mailboxes on my server so it took 5 days to block 1,000 messages. However, when I look at one of my average clients, with 100 to 150 users, McAfee blocked 1,000 messages in just 1 hour during the business day.

Keep in mind SonicWALL firewalls also block emails that originate from servers that are blacklisted as know sources of spam. These emails are blocked BEFORE they get to your network or your Exchange Server.

Look for handy tools on the Tools page.