Proofpoint Protection Server

Features:

Defend, Prevent, Encrypt, Optimize

Why purchase yet another point solution? Proofpoint's unified email security and data loss prevention platform provides comprehensive protection against both inbound threats and outbound content security risks–and Proofpoint's modular architecture lets you easily deploy new defenses as your needs change.

All Proofpoint features—including anti-spam, anti-virus, anti-phishing, multi-protocol content security, policy-based encryption, secure file transfer and reporting features—are managed centrally from a single administrative GUI and deployed on a unified appliance architecture. Features can be deployed in nearly any configuration, to meet your organization's unique requirements.

Whether your deployment involves a single Proofpoint server or multiple, globally distributed appliances, all policy management and administration tasks are controlled via Proofpoint's centralized, web-based administration console.

Defend Against Inbound Threats and Eliminate Spam at the Gateway, Upstream of the Email Server

Advanced Spam Detection, Powered by Proofpoint MLX™
Powered by patent-pending Proofpoint MLX machine learning technology, the Proofpoint Spam Detection™ module examines hundreds of thousands of attributes in every email—including message envelope headers and structure, image properties, sender reputation data as well as unstructured content in the body of messages—to block the most spam, image-based spam and phishing attacks, while automatically adapting to new attacks as they appear.

And the Proofpoint Dynamic Update Service™ automatically keeps your spam protection up-to-date, ensuring maximum effectiveness at all times. Individually controllable spam and adult content scores allow you to enforce zero-tolerance policies against pornographic spam. Anti-phishing features stop the spread of phish and other identity-theft attacks from stealing personal information from employees.

Proofpoint Spam Detection is multi-lingual and offers outstanding accuracy against spam in any language—including hard-to-analyze, multi-byte character languages such as Japanese and Chinese.

Anti-spam and anti-phishing policies can be customized at the global, group and end-user levels with full integration to LDAP or Active Directory to streamline ongoing administration.

Integrated Email Firewall Protection
The Proofpoint Email Firewall™ provides a stateful, first line of defense against spam and malicious connections by testing numerous connection-level data points including DNS, MX record verification, SPF, recipient verification, Proofpoint Dynamic Reputation information and optional netMLX data.

Innovative Connection Management
Proofpoint Dynamic Reputation™–powered by Proofpoint netMLX™–adds the industry's most powerful connection management features to your Proofpoint deployment. It's the only email reputation service that uses a combination of local, predictive behavioral data and globally-observed reputation–analyzed by powerful machine learning algorithms–to block incoming connections from malicious IP addresses.

All Proofpoint appliances and software deployments provide built-in, predictive, behavioral analysis of local IP traffic that responds in real-time to eliminate email traffic spikes caused by target attacks and to block or throttle malicious connections from botnets.

Customers with high email volumes can add the enhanced protection of Proofpoint netMLX to their deployments to reduce inbound connection volumes by a total of 80% or more. Proofpoint netMLX creates the industry's most accurate and up-to-date database of reputation for IP addresses sending email across the Internet. Each minute, hundreds of data points for all IP addresses are parsed with advanced machine learning algorithms to generate a score that represents the sender's reputation. Proofpoint Dynamic Reputation then uses these scores, combined with local behavioral data, to make intelligent decisions about accepting, throttling or rejecting incoming email connections.

Virus Protection and Zero-Hour Anti-Virus Defenses
Through strategic partnerships with leading anti-virus vendors, Proofpoint Virus Protection™ provides complete virus scanning functionality. Virus engines are deeply integrated with Proofpoint's platform, providing convenient, centralized administration of anti-virus policies from the same interface used to manage spam and content policies.

Messages are efficiently scanned for viruses in parallel with spam and message content, protecting end users from viruses, worms and other malicious code. Additionally, the Proofpoint Zero-Hour Anti-Virus™ module protects against emerging viruses in the earliest stages of their proliferation–stopping them hours before competing solutions even begin to react.

Prevent Leaks of Information Across Multiple Protocols

Proofpoint's advanced data loss prevention features can protect outbound email as well as additional message streams including web-based email, blog postings, message board postings and other HTTP- or FTP-based activity.

Content Compliance: Easily Enforce Acceptable Use Policies
Proofpoint Content Compliance™ makes it easy to define and enforce corporate acceptable use policies for message content and attachments. A convenient point-and-click interface simplifies the process of defining complex rules related to file types, message size, and message content. These features can be used to identify and prevent a wide variety of inbound and outbound policy violations–including offensive language, harassment, file sharing and violations of external regulations.

Regulatory Compliance: Keep Private Data Secure
More than ever, enterprises need to safeguard the privacy and security of customer and employee data. The Proofpoint Regulatory Compliance™ module enforces best practices for securing private data and protects your organization from liabilities associated with privacy and data security regulations (such as HIPAA, GLBA, PCI, SEC rules and others). Customizable rules, managed dictionaries and "smart identifiers" are used to automatically scan for non-public information–such as protected health information and personal financial information–and reject or encrypt messages as appropriate.

Proofpoint's smart identifiers are more sophisticated than simple regular expressions. They look for the correct number of digits or characters, but also perform complex algorithmic processing to ensure high detection accuracy while minimizing false positives.

Digital Asset Security: Protect Confidential Documents
As email, webmail and other messaging systems have become the most important communication channels, they've also become a conduit for the exposure of sensitive or confidential information. The Proofpoint Digital Asset Security™ module keeps valuable corporate assets and confidential data from leaking outside your organization via email and other messaging protocols.

Powerful MLX machine learning technology analyzes and classifies your confidential documents and then monitors for that information (or parts of that information) in the outbound message stream–stopping content security breaches before they happen.

Encrypt Sensitive Information

Proofpoint Secure Messaging™ adds powerful, content-aware encryption capabilities to your Proofpoint deployment, automatically encrypting messages based on your organization's policies. It automatically and consistently applies your encryption policies, without requiring end-users to take any special actions. Voltage IBE (identity based encryption) technology provides powerful, easy-to-use encryption without the key and certificate management hassles of other solutions. Proofpoint's hardware and virtual appliances also support digital certificates and enable gateway-to-gateway secure transfer and receipt of email using Transport Layer Security (TLS).

Analyze Your Messaging Infrastructure

Proofpoint Smart Search™ enhances Proofpoint's built-in logging and reporting features with advanced message tracing, forensics and log analysis capabilities–offering easy, real-time visibility into message flows across your entire messaging infrastructure. Search and analyze all of your message logs from one convenient, easy-to-use GUI–even across globally distributed Proofpoint deployments.

High-performance, Easy Deployment, Optimal Scalability

The Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway and Proofpoint Protection Server were designed to meet the unique needs of large enterprises, ISPs, universities and government organizations. They offer all of the performance, flexibility, scalability, customization and end-user control features needed in large-scale deployments.

Each and every component of the Proofpoint system is engineered to meet the rigorous demands of enterprise performance. From the hardened, messaging-optimized OS used in Proofpoint appliances, to Proofpoint's unique, queue-less architecture that allows all message scanning functions to be performed in memory, Proofpoint provides the high performance required in even the most sophisticated deployments.

Proofpoint appliances and software scale indefinitely to support many millions of messages per day. They can easily be deployed in multiple-appliance, master/agent configurations to support complex or geographically distributed data centers–offering the security of 100% redundancy combined with the convenience of a single administrative interface. Proofpoint even supports hybrid deployments with both hardware and the anti-spam virtual appliance working together.

Proofpoint's optimal scalability architecture lets you manage all agent servers from a single master console. Automatic configuration propagation, a centralized message quarantine and centralized reporting simplify maintenance and reduce total cost of ownership.

Proofpoint further reduces total cost of ownership by easily integrating with any IT infrastructure, no matter how distributed. A GUI-based LDAP command console and Microsoft Active Directory support make directory server integration easy. Proofpoint is also compatible with—and minimizes the burden on—overtaxed email server solutions such as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes.

Learn more about how to eliminate spam at the gateway, upstream of the email server

Technology:

Proofpoint MLX™ Technology

Advanced Machine Learning
The power behind Proofpoint's enterprise messaging security solutions—Proofpoint MLX—is an advanced, patent-pending machine learning system developed by the scientists at the Proofpoint Attack Response Center. Based on advanced statistical techniques including logistic regression and information gain analysis, Proofpoint MLX enables the accurate classification and identification of unstructured content, as found in email and other documents.

Unparalleled accuracy
Proofpoint MLX is the basis for the unrivalled anti-spam accuracy delivered by the Proofpoint Spam Detection module. Using MLX, Proofpoint analyzes hundreds of thousands of structural, image, content and reputation attributes to accurately differentiate between spam and valid messages. Traditional anti-spam solutions evaluate only a limited number of attributes and are unable to decisively classify spam, leading to low effectiveness and a high rate of false positives.

Futureproof intelligence
Proofpoint's intelligent anti-spam technology continually updates itself to defend against new forms of spam. Ongoing self-training and new techniques developed by Proofpoint scientists allow MLX to predict and adapt to new forms of spam as they appear. MLX updates are automatically delivered to all customers several times per day.

As a result, Proofpoint MLX offers higher than 99% effectiveness–even against the most difficult forms of image-based and foreign language spam.

Unlike other anti-spam solutions, Proofpoint's ability to defend against spam attacks does not degrade over time–and updates to the MLX anti-spam engine are automatically delivered to your enterprise on a regular basis. Proofpoint MLX is constantly evolving to counter emerging threats, ensuring that your messaging infrastructure is secure against tomorrow's spammers as well as today's.

Proofpoint MLX also powers the advanced content security features of the Proofpoint Digital Asset Security module and the intelligent perimeter security features of the Proofpoint Email Firewall and Dynamic Reputation service. Proofpoint is the only vendor to apply these powerful machine learning techniques to email security and data loss prevention.

Proofpoint Messaging Security Console™

Unified Policy Management, Administration and End-user Controls
The Proofpoint Messaging Security Console provides a centralized, 100% web-based administration interface to Proofpoint's unified policy management framework, ensuring consistent application of corporate messaging policies. The Console makes it easy to monitor and control your messaging infrastructure and define messaging policies. You can even define and enforce different policies for different groups of end-users. As additional Proofpoint modules are added to your deployment, the same convenient interface is used for policy management.

The Ajax-based interface gives you "drag and drop" customization of the reports, status information, RSS feeds and other components displayed. Even create "mashups" of information from external sources.

Proofpoint's outstanding ease-of-use extends to end-users as well. Easy-to-understand reports and controls, such as Proofpoint's end-user digest, web-based quarantine and personalized safe- and block-lists, give users complete control over their own spam preferences.

Robust Reporting
The Console also provides access to more than 60 real-time, graphical reports and alerts that give total visibility into the state of your enterprise messaging system. Reports can be easily emailed or posted as HTML/XML. Proofpoint's "active" reports deliver key information, but also allow administrators to take immediate action (e.g., simply click a link to block an abusive sender).

Proofpoint Dynamic Update Service™

Always up-to-date protection, maximum ease-of-administration
Automatic installation and notification of updated components makes ongoing administration simple. The Proofpoint Dynamic Update Service ensures that your network always has the highest level of protection from message-borne threats. It provides continuous updates for every component of your Proofpoint software or appliance deployment, including the hardened operating system and MTA, spam and virus engines, lexicons (such as the dictionaries used by the Proofpoint Regulatory Compliance module), application components and customized hot fixes.

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Software System Requirements
The Proofpoint Protection Server software is compatible with any downstream email server and is available for Linux hardware platforms.

Linux platforms:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES 3.0 or 4.0
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 4.0

Flexible Deployment Options
Proofpoint's email security and data loss prevention solutions are offered in a variety of form factors for maximum deployment flexibility:

• Hardware appliance: The Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway is a hardened, secure, easy-to-deploy appliance that installs in minutes. A variety of appliance models are available to support enterprises of any size.
   
• Virtual appliance: The Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway–Virtual Edition delivers the same best-in-class protection as Proofpoint's hardware appliances, combined with the many benefits of virtualization–including cost savings, rapid deployment and provisioning, simplified change management and easy backup and disaster recovery. The virtual appliance runs on any standard x86 desktop or server using VMware Server or VMware Infrastructure.
   
• Software: The Proofpoint Protection Server delivers Proofpoint's messaging security platform as software Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating systems.
   
• On-demand service: Proofpoint features are also available as a hosted service, Proofpoint Enterprise.

Diagram:

Proofpoint Next-Generation Hosting Architecture

Screenshots:

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Documentation:

Download the Proofpoint Protection Server Datasheet (PDF).