GWAVA Fingerprinting

What is Fingerprinting and how does it work?

Fingerprinting is the process of identifying e-mail attachments that have been altered or changed from their original creation format.  Unlike attachment filename filtering, fingerprinting ignores the filename and attempts to identify the type of file by its contents. It helps to protect your system from viruses because it does not rely solely on reading the filename, which can easily be changed to bypass your filename filtering. Fingerprinting relies mainly on headers rather than file extensions.

For example: If file: gwava.nlm is altered to be gwava.txt it still contains a "fingerprint" or identity of the nlm file that it was originally created.

What GWAVA Fingerprinting will do is detect that a change has occurred with the attached file and block it accordingly in respect to the Fingerprinting settings within your GWAVA Management System.

To Enable Fingerprinting within GWAVA follow these instructions:

1. Locate the scanner under the Server/Scanner Management tab.
2. In the Scanning Configuration folder, click Fingerprinting.

This article was originally published in the GWAVA knowledgebase as article ID 185.