With the ever increasing importance of the Internet as a mission critical ecommerce and communications platform for all businesses Aqua Technologies is pleased to announce several new layers of security across its network for all businesses it hosts.

Aqua has always prided itself on providing the highest levels of security, performance and support for its clients.  While we have always covered the basics of a well architected network with carefully configured servers and multi level firewalling, as you should expect of any ISP, we have continually endeavourd to improve on these with added network and server features.

Over the last 2 months we have implemented 3 new key security features on top of this sound basing.

Web Sentry Security System
An all new "free" web security intrusion and injection protection system for its Windows based hosting system.

Historically we have found that sites hosted on Windows platforms are prone to significantly more attempted hacks than other systems, either ettempting to use known or new vilnerabilities in the Windows operating system or weeknesses in the code of the web site such as SQL injection and cross site scripting.  These are issues that a firewall quite often cannot protect against.

We have therefore tested and implemented a new filter based protection system on each of our Windows web server that intercepts all traffic to each configured web site and, through a series of rules and algorithms, tries to spot such behaviour and then log, notify and filter.

For example, if someone attempts SQL injection by passing SQL statements in the URL to a web site to gain access to its underlying database out system will spot this behaviour and block the request.  So, even if your web site code is vulnerable, our system will stop the majority of such attempted hacks for you saving you embaressment and hours of time reinstating your web site.

If you already host with us and would like to benefit from this service please email support@aqnet.co.uk.

FTP Security Filter
A software based FTP filtering and protection system addressing common vulnerabilies on Windows based FTP along with the adoption of VSFTP (Very Secure FTP) for its Linux based FTP solution.

FTP, the mechnism via which you upload / publish web sites, has always been know to be an inhrantly insecure publishing mechnism with usernames and paswords being passed across the Internet in clear text.

With our Linux servers we have opted to use VSFTP (Very Secure FTP) as our FTP server due to its built in security features and robust nature.

On Windows we use Microsofts own FTP server due to its close integration with the server but this is little in the way of security mechnisms.  We have therefore been busy testing and implmenting a new filtering mechanism for Windows FTP which, agai, filters all traffic to the FTP servers and applies rules and algorithms to the traffic notifing, logging and blocking the originating IP of any suspicious behaviour.

This helps prevents Denial of Service attacks, dictionary attacks used to attempt to crack passwords and more, thereby reducing the risks of using FTP as a publishing mechnism.

All are Windows FTP servers are protected by this system by default.

Mail Security Upgrades
We have also, once again, upgraded our email antispam and antivirus systems adopting new cutting edge features to stamp out email spam and viruses for our clients.

• Kaspersky Antivirus Engine combines traditional antivirus defense methods with the latest proactive technologies
• Recurrent Pattern Detection Technology uses patented technology to identify patterns which are content agnostic to safeguard the original message. These patterns cannot be used to reconstruct the original message
• Zero Hour Virus Outbreak Protection provides proactive protection with real-time, anti-spam, zero-hour anti-virus, anti-spyware, and anti-phishing technology
• Inline Antivirus Scanning preventing infected messages from entering the network rather than letting them in the deleting them
• Automatic virus definition and spam rule updates
• Urgent update notification providing additional virus definition updates beyond regularly scheduled updates

With these latest technologies we can provided extremely good levels of preotection with virtually zero chance of blocking a legitimate message.

For all clients that host their email on our servers this protection is automatically applied.

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