2003 Exchange Open Relay

2003 Exchange Open Relay Consulting Services

More and more organizations are instituting policies that require security and vulnerability assessments on servers and systems before they're placed on the network. Many of these policies demand that you use auditing tools to scan your servers for exploits, confirm patch levels, provide security lockdown tips, and so on. For Exchange Server 2003 and Exchange 2000 Server email servers, a vulnerability that you need to take just as seriously is the open relay.

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What is an open relay?

An SMTP feature permits one server to act as an intermediary and accept messages on behalf of the final destination. The server then retransmits (or relays) the messages to the destination. In Exchange, you can configure servers to permit specific machines and users to relay mail. However, when configuration problems arise and anyone can use the system to relay mail, the result is an open relay. An open relay is dangerous for at least two reasons: First, SMTP is inherently unsecure, which makes it easy to spoof or forge the sender in a message. Lately, with the proliferation of viruses such as Bagel, we've seen how forging the sender can cause confusion and increase workloads. An open relay compounds this problem because a forged message sent from an open relay adds a certain level of authenticity—the message appears to have originated from a server in the specified sender's domain.

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Using the Exchange 2003 Mail Wizard

Exchange 2003 implements a new version of Internet Mail Wizard that helps you configure Internet mail connectivity with Exchange Server 2003 or Exchange 2000 Server.

You can use the wizard to send and receive internet mail. With the help of the Internet Mail wizard you do not have to configure the SMTP virtual server and the SMTP Connector manually.

Microsoft has deployed this wizard for small and medium sized Exchange organizations with a simple and not complex messaging infrastructure. The Mail Wizard does not work under the following circumstances:

Modified configuration settings of the Default SMTP Virtual Server.
The existence of an additional SMTP virtual server.
The server is a node on a Windows Cluster.
The server is a node on a Network Load Balancing cluster.
The server contains multiple network interface cards that are configured with separate networks, where Internet protocol (IP) routing is enabled between the networks.

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