Press Release
POSTINI REPORTS INCREASE IN UNWANTED EMAIL AND INSTANT MESSAGING ATTACKS DURING THE MONTH OF MARCH
Legitimate Email Accounts for 16 Percent of All Email; IM Volume Increases 200 Percent Compared to February
SAN CARLOS, CA, April 5, 2006 – Postini, the global leader in Integrated Message Management, today announced that spam volumes and instant messaging (IM) attacks were on the rise, while viruses dropped for the month of March. Postini processed over 23 billion messages and found that unwanted email totaled nearly 19.6 billion, a four percent increase compared to February, bringing the total amount of unwanted email to 84 percent for the month.
The company also filtered 6.5 million IM conversations in March, an increase of more than 200 percent over February’s 2.2 million, underscoring the growth of corporate IM.
“The increase of IM messages by 4.3 million in one month’s time is a clear indication that more corporations are adopting IM as a business communications tool,” said Andrew Lochart, senior director of marketing for Postini. “As more and more businesses move to IM, they will need a proven solution like Postini’s Integrated Message Management platform to better address their IM and email messaging needs.”
Postini measurements show that inbound TLS encryption volumes did not change from last month, with inbound TLS volumes remaining at seven percent of legitimate email and outbound at three percent.
While unwanted email was on the rise, viruses declined by 19 percent of all email in March, with Postini stopping a total of 32.5 million viruses. The top five viruses for March were:
| Virus Name | Quantity Blocked |
| Mytob | 16,742,504 |
| Netsky | 5,289,158 |
| Mimi | 2,669,122 |
| Lovgate | 1,633,323 |
| Bagle | 1,179,221 |
Postini protected its customers from more than 15 billion directory harvest attacks (DHAs), malicious attacks and email to invalid recipients, a seven percent increase over February’s 14 billion.
Legitimate email as a percentage of total SMTP connections remained virtually unchanged from February to March. Only 16 percent of all messages were legitimate email.
Postini’s StatTrak™ is available to users at www.postini.com/stats and provides the most up-to-date statistics on the latest viruses, spam and DHAs.
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.
