Message flood protection

The convenience offered by MM1 and MM4 messaging can be abused by users sending spam or attempting to overload the network with an excess of messages. MMS flood prevention can help prevent this type of abuse.

Overview

Setting message flood thresholds

Notifying administrators of floods

Example — three flood threshold levels with different actions for each threshold

Notifying message flood senders and receivers

Viewing DLP archived messages

Order of operations: flood checking before duplicate checking Bypassing message flood protection based on user’s carrier endpoints Configuring message flood detection

Sending administrator alert notifications

Overview

Flood protection for MM1 messages prevents your subscribers from sending too many messages to your MMSC. Configuring flood protection for MM4 messages prevents another service provider from sending too many messages from the same subscriber to your MMSC.

MM1 and MM4 flood protection

The FortiOS Carrier unit keeps track of the number of messages each subscriber sends for the length of time you specify. If the number of messages a subscriber sends exceeds the threshold, a configured action is taken. Possible actions are logging the flood, blocking or intercepting messages in the flood, archiving the flood messages, and sending an alert message to inform the administrator that the flood is occurring.

You can create three different thresholds to take different levels of action at different levels of activity. With this highly configurable system, you can prevent subscribers from sending more messages than you determine is acceptable, or monitor anyone who exceeds the thresholds.