Risk | Impact | How Quest Policy Authority Helps |
| Spyware, Trojans, Virus and Worm Attacks | Virus attacks named leading culprit of financial loss by U.S. companies in 2006 (CSI/FBI Computer Crime and Security Survey). | Policy Authority protects against both known and zero-day virus infections through automatically updated filters and heuristic analysis including bot-defeating technology. Policy Authority integrates with Sophos and Symantec to make this happen. |
| File Transfer Attacks | Trojan horse programs and other corrupt files sent over IM are undetected by email AV engines. | Policy Authority provides gateway security by filtering all IM traffic for content, viruses, spyware, worms, and inappropriate use. |
| Spam over Instant Messaging (SPIM) | IM worms, such as Osama Found, send unsolicited IM advertisements to a user's buddy list. | When Policy Authority receives a message containing an unknown URL, it alerts the IT administrator and puts the URL on a list of disallowed Web addresses, while preventing any further propagation of the message. Any future IM traffic containing the URL is automatically blocked once it is in the disallow list. |
| Identity Theft | Uncontrolled screen names allow rogue users to impersonate others and misrepresent company employees (for example, CEO@your-company.com) | Policy Authority correlates end user identities from the corporate directory to user handles and phone numbers for all real-time communications platforms. |
| Client Vulnerabilities | Buffer overflow vulnerabilities in AOL, MSN and Yahoo are well known and documented by CERT Coordination Center of Carnegie Mellon. | Policy Authority shuts down IM sessions in the event that a single user ID attempts to send more messages per second than any human could normally send. |
| HTTP Tunneling and Port Crawling | IM applications are designed to evade traditional network security blocking mechanisms. | Policy Authority provides blocking and alerting of unauthorized IM or peer-to-peer use on corporate networks. This is complemented by the protection for off-network PC's and laptops where employees circumvent IM management gateways. |
| Leakage of Confidential Information | Protecting sensitive information is difficult when conversations with outsiders are uncontrolled. | Policy Authority provides content filtering and tagging for IM conversations utilizing regular expressions. This helps prevent the loss of sensitive data, enables e-discovery, and protects against abusive or inappropriate language. |