Press Release
POSTINI COMMUNICATIONS INTELLIGENCE UPDATE FOR FEBRUARY REVEALS THAT BOT-NETS ARE FUELING UNPRECEDENTED ATTACKS
Spam Levels and Associated Costs Are the Highest in History
SAN CARLOS, CA, March 14, 2007 — Postini, the global leader in on-demand communications security and compliance solutions for email, instant messaging and the web, today announced that in February, email spam continued at record high levels, making up 93 percent of all email traffic processed. The continued surge is due in large part to the increased activity of bot-nets, millions of hijacked personal computers that have been infected to steal personal information and to distribute spam and viruses.
According to Postini, total spam has gone up 222 percent since November 2005 with 125 percent of this increase coming in the last 6 months. Major email-borne virus attacks in January and February were aimed at creating more bot-nets for future attacks. Heightened virus activity began in late December 2006 with the "Happy New Year" spam virus attack and continued in January with the "Storm" email attack. February has seen a steady stream of these types of attacks as hackers continue to harvest computers to add to their bot-nets.
The increased volume of attacks in February drove several all-time records. For the first time, Postini's global data centers processed more than two billion connections per day. Data volumes grew to more than 17 terabytes in a single 24-hour period. Average volumes of spams blocked per day rose to more than one billion.
The costs associated with the increased attacks have also skyrocketed. A new study from Ferris Research predicts that the global cost of spam in 2007 will be $100 billion compared to $50 billion in 2005. In the US alone, spam is expected to cost $35 billion in 2007, up from $19 billion 2 years ago.
"Following two of the largest outbreaks of e-mail viruses in history in December and January, as predicted, spam and other attacks reached all time highs in February," said Daniel Druker, executive vice president of marketing for Postini. "The rise of bot-nets has driven spam to be a $100 billion business issue in 2007, making it integral for all companies to seek solutions that keep their communications safe and productive."
These attacks represent a shift in tactics for the hackers away from self-propagating Internet worm viruses that copied and sent themselves to the email addresses they found on the PCs they infected. Instead, hackers are now able to use the bot-nets that they have harvested in order to launch these attacks as spam emails with viruses attached to them. By sending massive quantities of these emails timed with specific mainstream or newsworthy events, hackers only need a tiny fraction of these emails to get through and trick users into clicking on the attachment and infecting their PC. In this fashion the hackers are adding hundreds of thousands more computers to their bot-nets.
Postini's PreEMPT architecture provides 100 percent virus protection from virus attacks. Furthermore all attacks (viruses, spam, phishing, fraud, directory harvest attacks, Denial of Service attacks, etc.) are blocked "in the cloud" of the Internet, before they ever reach client networks. This saves valuable resources and allows businesses to achieve more reliable performance and predictable costs.
| Top Five Virus Counts for February: | |
| netsky | 8,163,522 |
| zhelatin | 7,619,985 |
| mime | 2,123,674 |
| downloader-bai.gen | 1,872,857 |
| mytob | 1,855,049 |
Total Viruses in February: 55,708,511
| Top Web Filtering Blocks by Category: | |
| Advertising & Promotion: | 15.79 percent |
| Chat & Instant Messaging: | 13.72 percent |
| Webmail: | 11.18 percent |
| Hosting & IT Services: | 8.46 percent |
| Software & Hardware: | 6.22 percent |
| Search & Portals: | 3.86 percent |
| Music: | 3.77 percent |
| Films & TV: | 3.46 percent |
| Pornography: | 3.29 percent |
| Gambling: | 3.17 percent |
Postini's StatTrak™ is available at www.postini.com/stats and provides the most up-to-date statistics on the latest viruses, spam and other attacks.
About Postini
Postini is the global leader in on-demand communications security,
compliance, and productivity solutions for email, instant messaging
and the web. Postini's award-winning services are designed to protect
customers from viruses, spam, phishing, fraud, and other attacks;
encrypt messages to ensure confidentiality and privacy; and archive
communications to ensure compliance with regulations and to prepare
for e-discovery.
More than 36,000 businesses rely on Postini everyday to protect them from a wide range of threats, ensure reliable communications reduce compliance and legal risks, and enable the intelligent management and enforcement of enterprise policies to protect intellectual property, reputations, and business relationships. For more information please contact Postini at info@postini.com or visit http://www.postini.com.
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