Download Firmware Cisco ESA AsyncOS 12.1 Refresh

Cisco has released a firmware update for its Email Security Appliances, which are abbreviated to ESA. The technology comes from IronPort Systems, which was purchased by Cisco in 2007. Although that was more than a decade ago, you still hear the name IronPort for these appliances. For the supported upgrade paths, it is recommended to read the documentation or contact Cisco’s TAC. The firmware is called 12.1 Refresh and has 12.1.0-087 as the exact version number. The list of changes looks like this:

Release Notes for AsyncOS 12.1 Refresh for Cisco Email Security Appliances

Changes in Behavior

• Changes in Character Encoding supported for Data Loss Prevention (DLP). Data Loss Prevention (DLP) now supports the following character encodings for multi-byte plain text files in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages:
  • Traditional Chinese (Big5)
  • Simplified Chinese (GB2312)
  • Korean(KS-C-5601/EUC-KR)
  • Japanese(Shift-JIS(X0123))
  • Japanese (EUC).

  However, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) does not support the following character encodings:

  • Japanese(ISO-2022-JP)
  • Korean(ISO2022-KR)
  • Simplified Chinese (HZGB2312)
• Changes in Mail Policy Settings. After you upgrade to this release, you can set the priority in which the appliance checks for message headers in the incoming and outgoing messages. The appliance first checks for the message header with the highest priority for all the mail policies. If there is no header match in any of the mail policies, the appliance looks for the next message header in the priority list for all the mail policies. If none of the message headers match in any of the mail policies, the default mail policy settings are used.

Lists of Known and Fixed Issues

• Known Issues
• Fixed Issues