Press Release
POSTINI'S ANNUAL MESSAGE MANAGEMENT AND THREAT REPORT SHOWS BUSINESSES HIT WITH INCREASINGLY SOPHISTICATED ATTACKS ON EMAIL AND INSTANT MESSAGING
Integrated Message Management Leader Analyzes 150 Billion Messages to Determine Companies Most At Risk
SAN CARLOS, CA, January 30, 2006 — Postini, the global leader in Integrated Message Management, today announced the release of its annual Message Management and Threat Report, detailing industry trends and predictions in threat management and message processing for 2005 and 2006. The report points to an increasing complexity and amount of attacks coupled with the deep concern of messaging system and security professionals about the crush of message traffic from email, Instant Messaging (IM), VoIP, SMS text messaging, and other emerging forms of enterprise communications.
The Postini study is based on primary research and statistics from Postini's global data centers, which currently process an average of one billion messages every day to form the most significant email and IM threat dataset in the world. The report findings are enhanced with a look ahead at the concerns and priorities of message managers based on a comprehensive survey of 615 professionals (see separate release from Postini today).
Security and business continuity are the biggest issues challenging companies as digital messages proliferate, according to the report. The incidence of spam has been continuously high, at between 75-80 percent during 2005, virus activity by Sober and others has dramatically increased, and new vectors of attack, such as IM and mobile email, are complicating the situation.
Key Findings:
Spam, Spam and More Spam
While spam levels as a percentage of all email traffic remained consistently high---between 75- 80 percent---spam as a proportion of all traffic showed a decline toward the end of the year as activity shifted to a higher proportion of virus and phishing activity versus spam.
Bargains, Fraud, Porn Top Spam Types
An analysis of spam messages by type shows that discount drugs and software (28 percent) and frauds, scams and phishing (27 percent) are the top spam categories in 2005, with special offers (20 percent) and pornography (15 percent) rounding out the top four.
Bigger is Better
Small companies were sent almost 50 spam emails per day per user in 2005, up from 36 in 2004. That's 4 times the number that employees at large companies were sent on average last year (12 in 2005 versus 3 in 2004).
Publishing and Advertising Lead All Industries in Spam
The publishing industry, with over 70 spams per user per day, and advertising, with more than 50, continued to lead all others in the amount of spam in 2005 just as they did the year before; however, healthcare, insurance, banking and utilities each saw multi-fold increases in 2005 over 2004 in this category.
Sober Threat Largest Ever
On November 29, 2005, Postini detected and blocked a massive outbreak of the Sober virus. Over a seven-day period, the Sober virus generated a 1500 percent increase in virus-infected traffic and Postini quarantined more than 218 million Sober-infected messages. Postini ultimately stopped more than 1.2 billion viruses over the next 30 days, making this outbreak the largest virus attack on record.
Viruses More Than an Inbound Threat
More than 2.5 percent of inbound email processed by Postini contained email-borne viruses that were blocked, while for those customers who have activated outbound content email filtering, nearly 2 percent had email-borne viruses blocked that could have infected recipients of their emails.
Phishing at All-Time High in Summer
Postini recorded a record summer season in 2005, as phishing attempts in July reaching their highest levels since the company started tracking for this type of fraudulent email. This increase may have been due in part to a hacking incident in May involving Credit Services International, in which more than 500,000 credit card processing records were compromised.
Encryption Becoming Mainstream
Postini observed a nearly ten-fold increase in encrypted messages in 2005, with 22 percent of all inbound messages encrypted by the end of the year, and a doubling of the percentage of outbound encrypted TLS connections.
December DHA Increase
While DHAs appeared to be declining over the course of the year, they increased dramatically in December, when Postini recorded more than 45 million attacks, comprising more than 8 billion attempted address lookups, double the average monthly amount during 2005.
IM Attacks Increased Dramatically, Vary by Network
According to data in the report sourced from IMLogic's Threat Center, attacks generated through Instant Messaging increased by 1700 percent in 2005. And MSN Messenger was by far the biggest IM network attacked, with 57 percent of attacks flowing through MSN, versus 34 percent for AOL, and 9 percent from Yahoo! Attackers also used "rootkit" technology late in the holiday season in a worm disguised as the "Santa" worm to attack unsuspecting IM users.
"We expect that the growth of more sophisticated and damaging threats, the proliferation of new communication channels, and the archiving and compliance demands of new policies and regulations will converge in 2006 to produce a 'tidal wave' of demands that threaten to overwhelm messaging administrators and security managers," said Quentin Gallivan, president and CEO of Postini. "Under this pressure, message and security professionals will be aggressively seeking solutions to help them develop message archiving strategy, secure new forms of messaging such as IM, comply with regulations, and ultimately integrate all types of messaging to improve threat response and overall message management."
Message Threat Expectations for 2006:
- Threats will continue to accelerate as spammers and hackers exploit multiple vectors of attack, including Instant Messaging, IP telephony and mobile devices.
- Spammers will expand the use of images as a substitute for text to circumvent older spam filters.
- Data retention and archiving activity for email and IM will grow in response to governance policies and regulations, while companies will demand more integrated and less labor intensive solutions (Nearly 80 percent see this integration as important).
- Encrypting messages will become standard practice as companies find new solutions that allow easy, policy-based encryption on demand.
- The continued federation or interoperability of public IM networks will permit worms to propagate faster and more widely, causing more damage to unprotected networks.
- Recent ISP activity that places limits on the number of messages their subscribers can send will expand in an attempt to control the volume of spam on their networks.
As the leading provider of integrated message management services, Postini is in a unique position to observe and describe message security activity and management trends due to the scale of its global message processing systems. Currently processing messaging traffic for more than 35,000 businesses and 9 million users worldwide, Postini sits between the message gateway and the Internet, preventing spam, viruses, phishing, IM worms and other message attacks from impacting customer message systems and networks. The 1 billion messages passing through Postini's managed service on a daily basis constitute a significant fraction of the world's business email traffic, and therefore provide a unique opportunity to accurately view worldwide message activity and trends.
The annual Message Management and Threat Report will be available on Postini's website starting January 30. To obtain a copy of the report, please visit: www.postini.com/2006ThreatReport.
About Postini
Postini is the global leader in Integrated Message Management, providing compliance, security, availability, and visibility solutions for corporate email and instant messaging. Postini offers a complete suite of services including message archiving and discovery, spam and virus blocking, and messaging continuity. The company's powerful managed services infrastructure seamlessly integrates with customers' infrastructure, providing uncompromising security for more companies than any other provider in the world. Postini's services protect organizations from a wide range of threats, reduce compliance and legal risks, ensure reliable communications, and enable the intelligent management and enforcement of enterprise policies that protect companies' intellectual property, reputations and business relationships. For more information contact Postini at 866-767-8461, or visit http://www.postini.com.
