ICAP – BlueFinch-ESBD

Clearswift – Secure ICAP Gateway – special offer

Carlijne Ultzen — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 12:32:53 +0000

End of the year offer - Clearswift

Scroll down to check out our offer

Clearswift’s Secure ICAP Gateway is a fully automated solution that augments the security of critical information flowing through an organization’s existing web proxy infrastructure or managed file transfers.

With the movement of data both internally and externally come the risks of accidental exposure of critical information or receiving hidden threats within documents or images. The added security features of ICAP enable organizations to inspect content for sensitive information, malware, or even high-risk executables that pose a threat to your data.

A powerful combination

GoAnywhere MFT can send files over the ICAP protocol to inspect the contents for sensitive information such as credit card numbers, personally identifiable information (PII) and health care information. For example, before files are sent to a trading partner through Secure Mail  or  SFTP, a Project in GoAnywhere MFT can scan the file for sensitive information. If the file contents are cleared, the transfer will occur as normal. If the file contents are deemed sensitive and blocked by the Clearswift solution, GoAnywhere MFT can alert administrators and deny the file transfer from occurring. 

Combine Clearswift and GoAnywhere for ultimate security in file transfers!

How it works

Sharing files securely is key to smooth business operations – and now it’s easier than ever with the SFT Threat Protection Bundle. By combining the power of Managed File Transfer with Secure ICAP Gateway, you can transfer files without fear of threats or data leakage.

Prevent malware from being shared
Block files with sensitive data from being shared
Redact sensitive information and remove sensitive links

Key Features

ICAP Gateway: Operates in both forward proxy and reverse proxy mode, providing comprehensive protection for inbound and outbound activities. 
Antivirus: To prevent viruses, malware and other malicious content from entering your organisation. When a new file is uploaded to GoAnywhere MFT, the file contents can be sent to the antivirus software for scanning.  If malicious content is found, GoAnywhere MFT can quarantine or delete the file, and then send an email alert to an administrator. 
OCR: The OCR process examines the text image and creates computer-readable text by scanning the pixels that together form an image of the text.
Data Redaction: Sensitive data or critical information is automatically removed from documents and images. Text in images is identified using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). 
Document Sanitisation: Metadata, change history and properties are removed from files. 
Structural Sanitisation: Active code such as macros, scripts and Active/X are removed from common document formats. 
Requires GoAnywhere Advanced Workflows: User-friendly workflow programming interface allows you to create file transfer workflows and integrations without the limitations imposed by legacy systems and applications and without the need for code, scripting, or complicated batch files.

Subscription package

Clearswift ICAP Gateway for MFT (Requires Advanced Workflows)

The solution is possible by subscription or perpetual.

End of year offer

If you are interested, we are offering a free Clearswift – ICAP training session for a limited time only.
The offer will be available for orders made until 1 December 2024.

However, payment for the order can be made in 2025.

How to proceed?

It’s very simple. Fill in the following form and our expert will contact you by email or telephone as soon as possible.
It will first qualify your needs, then he will suggest dates to arrange a live demonstration of the solution with our technical engineers.

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Ensuring File Integrity and Guaranteed Delivery

Éloïse Gruber — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 14:43:02 +0000

From critical business documents to personal files, ensuring that data remains intact and reaches its destination reliably is essential. This article explores the concepts of file integrity and guaranteed delivery, discussing their significance, challenges, and solutions.

1/ Significances and challenges

File Integrity and common threats

File integrity refers to the assurance that a file has not been altered or corrupted during storage, transmission, or processing. It is a fundamental aspect of data security, ensuring that information remains accurate, consistent, and reliable. However, maintaining file integrity poses several challenges, including malicious attacks, hardware failures, and software glitches.

One of the primary methods for verifying file integrity is through cryptographic hashing. This technique generates unique identifiers based on the contents of a file. Any alteration to the file, no matter how minor, will result in a different hash value, thus alerting users to potential integrity breaches. Implementing hashes is essential for detecting data tampering and unauthorized modifications, particularly in environments where data integrity is critical, such as financial transactions or legal documents.

Regular monitoring and auditing of systems are imperative for detecting anomalies and ensuring compliance with data integrity and delivery standards. Automated monitoring tools can track file access, modifications, and transmission activities, flagging any deviations from expected behaviour. Auditing processes provide a comprehensive review of file integrity and delivery practices, identifying areas for improvement and ensuring adherence to regulatory requirements.

Secured delivery

Ensuring the secure delivery of files is equally essential, especially in today’s interconnected world were data traverses’ vast networks and systems. The transmission process introduces vulnerabilities such as network failures, packet loss, and interception by malicious actors. To address these challenges, protocols like TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) with acknowledgment mechanisms are employed to guarantee delivery reliability. TCP/IP, for instance, establishes a reliable connection between sender and receiver, ensuring that data packets are delivered in the correct order and retransmitted if necessary. UDP, while faster, lacks built-in reliability mechanisms but can be augmented with application-level acknowledgment and retransmission strategies to ensure delivery.

In addition to protocols, encryption plays a crucial role in securing file delivery. By encrypting data before transmission, even if intercepted, it remains indecipherable to unauthorized parties. Encryption protocols like SSL/TLS (Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security) provide end-to-end encryption for secure communication over networks, safeguarding sensitive information from eavesdropping and tampering.

Implementing redundancy and fault tolerance mechanisms further enhances delivery reliability. Techniques such as data replication, mirroring, and RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) ensure that files are backed up and available even in the event of hardware failures or system crashes. These redundancy measures are particularly important for mission-critical systems where uninterrupted access to data is essential.

File integrity and secure delivery are crucial in various sectors, including healthcare, finance, government, and e-commerce. For instance, in healthcare, ensuring the integrity and confidentiality of patient records is essential for compliance with regulations like HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). Similarly, in finance, secure delivery of financial transactions and sensitive data is vital for preventing fraud and maintaining customer trust.

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) mandates stringent measures to ensure the security and integrity of personal data. Compliance with GDPR requires organizations to implement robust data protection measures, including encryption, access controls, and regular audits.

2/ Solutions

Whether you want secure file transfer, fast delivery or protect critical data, here are some solutions that can meet your needs.

How to detect threats?

With many data threats, some organisations are turning to Data Loss Prevention (DLP) to truly protect their critical data. Sharing information carries risks, including exposing sensitive content, whether it is sent by mistake or hidden in metadata. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions help you strengthen the security of your data while minimizing the risk of data and/or metadata disclosures.

Here are some essential features:

Content Inspection

Inspect the contents of your documents and make sure that sensitive data is not transmitted. Deep content inspection adds an extra layer of security when sharing sensitive information. In addition, it ensures compliance with the standards and regulations in force in your company and sector of activity.

Minimize false positives.

When analysing content, including in a compressed file, DLP solutions distinguish between elements that may look like personal data, but are not personal data. Effective detection results in an extremely low rate of false positives.

Threat Detection

Inspecting the content is good; but also looking for viruses and malware that can hide there is even better! These advanced scans enable detection of viruses and malicious code that are then removed to ensure secure sharing of sensitive data.

Anti-stenography

This DLP feature prevents files, messages, images, or videos from being hidden in a file, both for incoming (malicious code concealment) and outbound (data exfiltration concealment) items.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

The optical character recognition function allows you to process the text contained in an image before it is sent. In short, images containing sensitive information are also identified before sending.

Clearswift software for file integrity

Every company faces the risk of data leakage, as sharing sensitive information with partners, suppliers, and customers is crucial in today’s business landscape. Therefore, safeguarding against data leaks is imperative to ensure the security of your business.

Clearswift offers a cybersecurity solution with data and transfer protection functionalities. Using a single layer of real-time inspection, this tool identifies and addresses threats effectively.

Powered by a sophisticated content inspection engine, all Clearswift modules detect, analyse, and modify content in real-time. Its distinctive redaction and sanitization capabilities selectively remove elements prone to causing data breaches or disruptive cyberattacks, thus maintaining smooth and risk-free communications.

Replay webinar : How to Remove Security Risk & Threats from File Transfers

Secured delivery and file integrity with Managed File Transfer tool

A file transfer solution is often software that automates and secures transfer movements and actions via a network and a communication protocol such as HTTPS, SFTP, AS2, FTPS, PeSIT, etc. The security of the transfer will depend on the protocol used for communication between the computer systems. 

MFT ensures file integrity even if connectivity is interrupted or if the files sent are large.

Regulatory compliance is an important part of MFT. Certain regulations (PCI DSS, GDPR, HIPAA, Basel, DORA, SOX, ISO 27001, FISMA & NIST, etc.) require detailed audit information to be stored and tracked. Being able to generate complete audit logs of all transfer activities and reports is therefore essential. 

Introducing GoAnywhere MFT

GoAnywhere MFT (Managed File Transfer) is a professional file transfer management solution. With a centralised approach based on a modular architecture, GoAnywhere MFT allows you to streamline and reduce the costs associated with your file transfers and related business processes.

GoAnywhere MFT consolidates all your communication protocols into a single application.

This managed file transfer (MFT) tool will adapt to all your technical constraints and scalability with its clustered architecture. With GoAnywhere, Protect critical data with standards-based AES or Open PGP encryption and files in transit with SFTP, SCP, FTPS, AS2 and HTTPS.

Deployable on-premises, in cloud and hybrid environments, it provides a single point of control with extensive security settings, detailed audit logs and reporting.

Ensuring fast and secured delivery

Many organisations continue to rely on FTP (File Transfer Protocol) for moving large files, despite its drawbacks. Slow and susceptible to network issues, FTP is considered outdated technology. Particularly challenging for international transfers, FTP often experiences disconnections and fails to achieve optimal speeds. These inherent limitations make it challenging, if not impossible, to accelerate file transfers using FTP. From timeouts to latency, TCP poses issues that UDP, another protocol, does not.

UDP-based Data Transfer Protocol (UDT) emerges as a high-performance alternative, specifically designed for transferring large datasets across high-speed wide area networks. Such environments are typically unsuitable for the more conventional TCP protocol. Given the extended durations associated with TCP transfers, even with increased bandwidth, UDP has emerged as the preferred choice for expediting file transfers.

Introducing FileCatalyst

FileCatalyst is a robust accelerated file transfer software solution that supports client/server architecture, enabling the fast transfer of large files. FileCatalyst solutions are designed specifically to allow the transfer of large files over remote networks experiencing high latency or packet loss.

FileCatalyst provides FTP alternatives that permit sending files of any size or format at full line speed, hundreds of times faster than FTP, while ensuring secure and reliable delivery.

Each FileCatalyst product serves a unique set of organizational file transfer needs and works across a variety of industries.

On its own, FileCatalyst Direct uses the FileCatalyst Server and a full suite of client options for point-to-point transfers. Combining FileCatalyst Direct with FileCatalyst Workflow provides a complete managed and accelerated web-based solution.

Adding FileCatalyst Central allows you to monitor your organisation’s entire FileCatalyst deployment by offering a consolidated web-based view of file transfers on your network.

In conclusion

In conclusion, maintaining file integrity and ensuring secure delivery are non-negotiable aspects of data management in the digital era. By employing cryptographic hashing, reliable protocols, encryption, redundancy measures, IT solutions, and rigorous monitoring and auditing practices, organisations can mitigate risks, safeguard their data assets, and uphold the trust and integrity of their information systems. In a landscape fraught with cyber threats and data breaches, prioritizing file integrity and safe delivery is essential for preserving the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of critical information.

The ICAP protocol

Éloïse Gruber — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 14:32:18 +0000

The Internet Content Adaptation Protocol (ICAP) was formally introduced in December 1999 by the ICAP Forum. ICAP is a lightweight protocol developed in the 2000s and specified in RFC 3507. The objective of the protocol is to provide a generic interface for communicating with content filtering solutions on the Internet.

ICAP defines “a standardised interface between network equipment playing the role of client (proxy server, firewall, security gateways), and service equipment (ICAP servers) whose objective is analysis and adaptation in real-time web feeds.

ICAP is a request/response protocol that is similar in semantics and usage to HTTP. It allows ICAP clients to transmit HTTP messages to ICAP servers for transformation or other processing (“adaptation”). The server runs its transformation service on the messages and returns responses to the client, usually with modified messages. Typically, suitable messages are HTTP requests or HTTP responses.

ICAP is typically used to implement virus scans and content filters in HTTP proxy caches. Content adaptation involves performing the particular value-added service (content manipulation) for the associated customer request/response.

ICAP uses TCP/IP as its transport protocol. The default port is 1344, but other ports can be used. The TCP flow is initiated by the ICAP client to a passively listening ICAP server.

The strengths of ICAP

The ICAP protocol, inspired by the HTTP protocol, from which it uses certain methods, however, is distinguished by several advantages:

A simple transactional mode, consisting of passing several pieces of information through a single transmission medium. This allows the same resource to be shared between several users
Data preview features
Early interruptions of processing in order to limit exchanges between clients and ICAP servers
Managing load distribution and redundancies

ICAP focuses on leveraging edge devices (caching proxies) to help provide value-added services. At the heart of this process is a cache that serves as a proxy for all client transactions and processes them through web servers.

These ICAP servers focus on a specific function, for example ad insertion, virus scanning, multi-AV scanning, content translation, language translation or content filtering. Offloading value-added services from web servers to ICAP servers allows those same web servers to be sized based on raw HTTP throughput without having to manage these additional tasks.

ICAP, the Internet Content Adaptation Protocol, is a protocol aimed at providing a simple object-based content vector for HTTP services.

ICAP and DLP

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is a set of tools and processes used to ensure that sensitive data is not lost, intentionally misused, or accessed by unauthorized users.

DLP enforces remediation through alerting, encryption, and other protective actions to prevent end users from accidentally or maliciously sharing data that could create risks for the organization.

ICAP and the MFT

MFT (Managed File Transfer) or SFT (secure file transfers), protects “the movements and actions” of files at rest and in transit. Secure file transfers ensure file integrity and movement even if connectivity is interrupted or the files being sent are large.

Secure file transfer solutions encrypt information and create audit trails of transfer activity to provide necessary documentation for compliance requirements such as PCI DSS, GDPR, SOX, HIPAA, NIST and others.

With MFT, you can choose to transfer the files using different secure protocols such as SFTP, FTPS, HTTPS, AS2, AS4, etc.

The ICAP and MFT combination

Any incoming communication can pose a threat to an organization and file exchange is no exception. Files received from third parties may contain malicious code embedded in a harmless document.

DLP enhances the MFT’s ability to control information by applying deep content inspection and adaptive data loss prevention to enforce more comprehensive information security policies to prevent data loss, ensure compliance and prevent malware threats from infecting the organization.

This integration between ICAP and MFT starts with workflows and triggers defined according to your business needs, replaces sensitive text with asterisks, and detects/erases text (even in images) so that activities can continue, without the incriminated content. This integration of data security also helps ensure compliance with sector regulations.

This combination of file transfers and advanced threat protection provides end-to-end security and monitoring, with content inspection and redaction occurring in file transfers through ICAP before the files are even sent or received via MFT.

Use cases

By implementing ICAP, businesses are able to apply deep content inspection, adaptive redaction, and data leak prevention technologies to existing web security architectures.

Editing content

An Internet service provider can use a transparent HTTP proxy and modify web content received by the user via an ICAP server in order to:

To insert advertising within web pages
To detect the presence of malicious content and warn the user by inserting a warning and deleting suspicious content.

Files received by third parties, such as purchase orders, invoices or legal documents, may contain malicious content. ICAP helps neutralize risks such as embedded malware, suspicious scripts, and other high-risk content that enters or exits your organization without disrupting the flow of communication.

Secure your file transfers

Email is the primary vector of incoming threats, but also a source of data leaks.

Protect your organisation from threats and data leaks when sharing files internally or externally.

Prevent accidental sharing of files containing sensitive data and redact sensitive information from file transfers to eliminate data and compliance risks.

With ICAP, you prevent ransomware and other malware from entering your organization and being shared externally.

Source :

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3507

https://www.goanywhere.com/products/goanywhere-mft/connectivity/icap

https://web.archive.org/web/20170829065223/http://www.icap-forum.org/documents/specification/icap_whitepaper_v1-01.pdf

Integrating Clearswift Secure ICAP Gateway with GoAnywhere MFT

Éloïse Gruber — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 09:51:01 +0000

The Secure ICAP Gateway (SIG) adds significant data security assurances and value to MFT through its threat protection, deep content inspection engine, adaptive data redaction, and flexible policy settings, while GoAnywhere MFT makes defining, managing, and securing files at rest and in motion easier.

One common use case:

GoAnywhere securely transfers attachments between employees or trading partners.
The ICAP only intercepts content when threat protection and data loss prevention requirements exist.
ICAP runs rule set (keywords search, executable renaming, script removal, etc.)
If the content cannot be sanitised, the transmission is allowed and continues.
If the content can be sanitised, the transmission is blocked.

Additional features you can add to your file transfer process are structural sanitisation, document sanitisation, data redaction, anti-steganography, and optical character recognition. Adding the security features within ICAP helps you get the best and most thorough security for file transfers.

Deep Content Inspection

A deep content inspection (DCI) engine fully disassembles the communication flow in real time and applies the appropriate policy depending the content, context and required regulation policy. A context-aware scanning capability helps detect and prevent scenarios where users try to upload documents containing Intellectual Property for example to Shadow IT websites or cloud file sharing apps such as Dropbox.

The DCI engine also offers true-file type detection and file structure verification to prevent executable files from being downloaded.

Adaptative Redaction

Rather than block content flowing through the Secure ICAP Gateway, unique Adaptive Redaction features sanitise sensitive or critical data in Microsoft Office, Open Office, PDF and image files in real time, keeping them safe and secure.

Data Redaction: Sensitive data or critical information is automatically removed from documents and images. Text in images is identified using Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

Document and Image Sanitisation: Metadata, change history and properties are removed from files.

Structural Sanitisation: Active code (macros, scripts and Active/X) is removed from common document formats.

ICAP for Antivirus and DLP

To prevent viruses, malware and other malicious content from entering your organisation, GoAnywhere MFT can integrate with antivirus solutions using the standard ICAP protocol. When a new file is uploaded to GoAnywhere MFT, the file contents can be sent to the antivirus software for scanning.  If malicious content is found, GoAnywhere MFT can quarantine or delete the file, and then send an email alert to an administrator.

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in GoAnywhere MFT

GoAnywhere MFT can send files to a DLP solution over the ICAP protocol to inspect the contents for sensitive information such as credit card numbers, personally identifiable information (PII) and health care information. The DLP solution will instruct GoAnywhere MFT on whether or not to proceed with the file transfer. For example, before files are sent to a trading partner through Secure Mail  or  SFTP, a Project in GoAnywhere MFT can scan the file for sensitive information. If the file contents are cleared, the transfer will occur as normal. If the file contents are deemed sensitive and blocked by the DLP solution, GoAnywhere MFT can alert administrators and deny the file transfer from occurring.

Combine Clearswift and MFT for Ultimate Security in File Transfers!