Press Release
POSTINI REPORTS INCREASE IN INSTANT MESSAGING ATTACKS DURING THE MONTH OF APRIL
Corporate IM Volume Jumps 15 Percent Compared to March; Legitimate Email Accounts for Just 16 Percent of All Email
SAN CARLOS, CA, May 03, 2006 – Postini, the global leader in Integrated Message Management, today announced that instant messaging (IM) attacks were on the rise, while spam and virus volumes held steady for the month of April. Postini processed over 22 billion messages and found that unwanted email accounted for 18.5 billion messages, a one percent decrease compared to March, bringing the total amount of unwanted email to 84 percent for the month.
The company filtered 7.6 million IM conversations in April, an increase of more than 15 percent from March’s 6.5 million, underscoring the continued growth of corporate IM. Compared to email viruses which are roughly 2-3 percent of all email, IM malicious content is relatively low at .1 percent of all IM traffic. However, that is an increase of 400 percent from March when only .025 percent of IM conversations were blocked as malicious. Postini noted that the Mytob virus had a variant that was traversing all IM and enterprise clients. Trojans that were blocked included IMFlood and JahuKit, and worms included Appflet, YahooSpy, Mpass, and MSNFake.
“The continued increase in IM messages by 5.5 million over the past two months is a clear indication that IM is becoming a main-stream business communications tool for employees,” said Andrew Lochart, senior director of marketing for Postini. “As businesses move to IM, they will need a proven solution like Postini Perimeter Manager for IM to address their IM security needs.”
Postini measurements show that TLS (Transport Layer Security) encrypted message volumes remained steady at seven percent of legitimate email.
While IM attacks were on the rise, the number of quarantined viruses remained the same as March, with Postini stopping a total of 28 million viruses. The top five viruses for April were:
| Virus Name | Quantity Blocked |
| MyTob@MM | 9,734,948 |
| Netsky | 4,948,258 |
| Mytob | 4,764,122 |
| Swen | 2,157,894 |
| Lovgate | 1,774,849 |
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.
