Press Release
POSTINI REPORTS SPAM ZOMBIES STILL FEASTING ON USER INBOXES BEFORE HALLOWEEN
Postini's Email Stat Track Data Indicates Spam Drops to 69% for the Month of October
REDWOOD CITY, CA, October 29, 2004 — Postini, the industry's leading provider of email security and management for the enterprise, today announced that spam, the most "vile" form of email, continued to threaten email users this month, accounting for approximately 69% of all email processed by Postini in October. Such "ghastly" instances of netsky far and away led the attack of viruses, making it the top virus threat for the month of October with Postini blocking a total of 30,902,566 copies.
"Zombies are playing a larger role in spam attacks," said Andrew Lochart, director of product marketing at Postini. "Spam zombies are popping up all over the world, especially on the newer broadband networks. For example, we've recently noticed a lot of activity in Paris that's coming from a cable TV operator there who recently started offering broadband access to their subscribers. It's eerie how fast the spammers set up shop on those home PCs."
During the month of October, Postini processed over 6.6 billion messages and prevented a total of almost 75 million virus instances from "creeping" into corporate networks, a decrease of 4.9 percent from last month. According to Postini, the top-ten scariest viruses of October were:
| Virus Name | Quantity Detected |
| 1. netsky | 30,902,566 |
| 2. mime | 13,772,552 |
| 3. bagle | 9,887,187 |
| 4. zafi | 6,872,766 |
| 5. bankfraud | 4,343,113 |
| 6. zerolin | 3,095,974 |
| 7. mydoom | 2,592,083 |
| 8. lovgate | 1,552,761 |
| 9. dumaru | 487,873 |
| 10. klez | 454,789 |
Postini also saw an increase in directory harvest attacks (DHAs), an attempt by spammers to hijack and steal an enterprises entire email directory and use it to send out junk email attacking corporate email servers. Postini fended off over 14 million DHAs and blocked over 4 billion invalid delivery attempts.
As part of its ongoing report that the spam war is changing from a content filtering battle to a real time SMTP connection management battle, Postini announced it received 14 billion SMTP requests, blocking over 50% of those requests based on the IP address of the sender. Of the 14 billion SMTP connections received, only 14 percent were legitimate email.
About Postini
Postini, Inc. is the leading provider of email security and management
services that protect email infrastructure by preventing spam and attacks from
reaching the enterprise gateway. Postini's patented managed services model
utilizes exclusive preEMPT™ transport and content filtering technology to
eliminate spam and viruses, stop DoS and directory harvest attacks, safeguard
content, and improve email performance. Founded in 1999, Postini processes more
than 2.4 billion message connections every week for more than 4,000 companies.
By blocking spam, viruses and attacks before they can reach the enterprise email
gateway, Postini Perimeter Manager is designed to assure complete email security
while saving bandwidth, conserving server capacity and minimizing administrative
costs. For more information contact Postini at its Redwood City, California
headquarters toll-free at 866.767.8461, or visit www.postini.com.
Postini is a registered trademark of Postini, Inc.
Marty Tacktill
Senior Director, Worldwide Public Relations
650.482.3197
650.482.3109 FAX
marty@postini.com
Kimberly Canedo
Neale-May & Partners
650.328.5555 ext. 278
kcanedo@nealemay.com
