I am planning to implement a new exchange box in house and after reading many of the implementation strategies here and elsewhere, I am curious whether the following plan of attack that I have put together will work (will be secure).
- i will make the exchange server a domian controller of its own solitary domain and i will duplicate the domain user account from the corporate domain to it (i realize the administrative burden of implementing and maintaining this)
- i will put the exchange server in the DMZ of a Pix firewall and allow for OWA to be publically available.
- the corporate users will use the exchange server as a pop and smtp server only (which will have little impact because the domain users use outlook express and outlook for pop3 accounts). this should result in no additional ports being open from the DMZ to the corporate lan
- if the server is compromised, there is no trusts between the exchange domain and the corporate domain so the attack should be contained to the exchange server
- other than the additional administrative burden of having duplicate accounts, the only other CON i can foresee is that the exchange domain accounts will have to allow for passwords to never expire because end users will never actually log into the domain (only into OWA and POP'ing the server)
is there anything else about this implementation that i have overlooked that could be potentially dangerous to the exchange server and/or corporate lan? i have not heard or read about this specific approach to securing the mail server and i cannot help but think that there might be a reason for it that i am just not aware of. i appreciate all feedback regarding this matter. thank you very much in advance.
- i will make the exchange server a domian controller of its own solitary domain and i will duplicate the domain user account from the corporate domain to it (i realize the administrative burden of implementing and maintaining this)
- i will put the exchange server in the DMZ of a Pix firewall and allow for OWA to be publically available.
- the corporate users will use the exchange server as a pop and smtp server only (which will have little impact because the domain users use outlook express and outlook for pop3 accounts). this should result in no additional ports being open from the DMZ to the corporate lan
- if the server is compromised, there is no trusts between the exchange domain and the corporate domain so the attack should be contained to the exchange server
- other than the additional administrative burden of having duplicate accounts, the only other CON i can foresee is that the exchange domain accounts will have to allow for passwords to never expire because end users will never actually log into the domain (only into OWA and POP'ing the server)
is there anything else about this implementation that i have overlooked that could be potentially dangerous to the exchange server and/or corporate lan? i have not heard or read about this specific approach to securing the mail server and i cannot help but think that there might be a reason for it that i am just not aware of. i appreciate all feedback regarding this matter. thank you very much in advance.
