Press Release
POSTINI REPORTS RECORD 500 PERCENT INCREASE IN INSTANT MESSAGING ATTACKS DURING THE MONTH OF MAY
IM Volume Jumps 138 Percent Compared to April; Legitimate Email Accounts for Just 14 Percent of All Email
SAN CARLOS, CA, June 6, 2006 – Postini, the global leader in Integrated Message Management, today announced that in May its systems registered a 138 percent increase in corporate Instant Messaging (IM) traffic and a 500 percent increase in Instant Messaging attacks, clearly demonstrating that hackers see the opportunity in compromising IM and underscoring the need for businesses to secure their networks from unwanted IM traffic.
Postini stopped numerous IM viruses and worms such as Browaf, Tilebot, and Khoobe from infiltrating customers' networks. Those customers cited assurance of threat prevention as the top benefit to using the Postini Perimeter Manager for IM service, followed by the visibility into, and control over, who within an organization is using public IM.
"The fact that IM messages more than doubled in just one month shows the rate companies are adopting IM as a mainstream business communications tool," said Andrew Lochart, senior director of marketing for Postini. "The sheer volume of IM attacks is a dramatic demonstration that we're in an environment where hackers, knowing that most organizations are still unprotected against IM malware, are rapidly adopting IM for their attacks. That being said, IM attacks are still only a fraction of the number of email attacks, so it's important companies keep up their guard on both fronts."
In May, Postini also processed more than 25 billion email messages, a 13 percent increase from April, with more than 86 percent of all traffic being malicious or unwanted content. Out of the 25 billion email messages processed by Postini's global data centers, 65 percent of those messages were rejected at the network layer, the only place to stop attacks like DHAs (directory harvest attacks) and DoS (denial of service), where there is no content in the body of the message to analyze with standard techniques.
Postini continued to block all email-borne viruses for its customers, based on its patented PREEMPT™ heuristic technology, as well multiple virus scan engines. The top five viruses for May were:
| Virus Name | Quantity Blocked |
| MyTob Variants | 5,206,192 |
| Netsky | 2,492,450 |
| Swen | 1,340,982 |
| Mydoom | 803,051 |
| LovGate | 788,252 |
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, instant messaging and web. Postini offers a complete suite of services including archiving, spam and virus blocking, content control, encryption, and business continuity. The company's powerful managed services infrastructure seamlessly integrates with customers' environment, 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 please contact Postini at info@postini.com or visit http://www.postini.com.
