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INCIDENCE OF SPAM, VIRUSES, AND FRAUDULENT EMAIL
ATTACKS
TO INCREASE DRAMATICALLY IN 2004
Postini, Inc. Announces Top Spam Predictions and Trends
for the New Year
REDWOOD CITY, CA, December 17, 2003 – Spam will increase as a total percentage of email from more than 50 to more than 75 percent. Directory harvest attacks will be on the rise while most victims won't realize they've been attacked. And anti-spam legislation alone will not be effective in stopping spammers. These are just a few of the insights and predictions gleaned from an independent analysis of the over 30 billion emails processed this year by Postini, Inc., the leading provider of email security and management services for the enterprise.
Currently, the company processes over 1 billion email messages per week, and quarantines 80 percent of the messages as spam or viruses for leading corporations and enterprises, making Postini the fourth largest processor of email after AOL, MSN and Yahoo!
Based on a comprehensive set of processing technologies and advanced heuristics and analysis capabilities, Postini has developed a full set of spam and email security predictions for 2004:
Postini's Top Ten 2004 Spam and Email Security Predictions
- Spam will increase as a total percentage of email from more than
50 to more than 75 percent.
- Directory harvest attacks will continue to increase dramatically
while most victims won't realize they've been attacked.
- "Phishing" – fraudulent email used to steal the recipient's
identity information – will rise significantly as well, recasting
spam as a damaging activity rather than a nuisance.
- Legislation alone will not be effective in stopping spammers.
- Technology will play the key role in protecting email users from
spam.
- Internet users and IT managers will face the much-anticipated "Sobig.G"
variant of one of the highest volume viruses of all time.
- Corporations will begin to adopt managed perimeter defense services
to protect employees from offensive spam attacks.
- Spam and virus protection will continue to be critical email management
issues.
- IT Managers will implement much more restrictive use policies for
how employees use email in an effort to reduce the burden of spam.
- Regulatory compliance will continue to drive the need for outbound email filtering by enterprises.
"More than 70 percent of executives in a recent survey said that email is more important to their business than even the telephone," said Postini CEO and president Shinya Akamine. "As such, professionals should not be any more content with the growing onslaught of spam than they would be if 80 percent of their incoming calls were telemarketing solicitations. As the most mission critical application in the enterprise, email must be protected from increasing incidence of attack and spam intrusion."
Based on messages processed this year, Postini's spam and security insights from 2003 include the following facts:
- 81.3 percent of 160,611,437 emails currently processed by Postini
per day are spam (that's 10 of every 12 messages on average).
- The ratio of spam to legitimate email increased from 65 to 80 percent
during 2003.
- The top three email viruses in 2003 were Sobig.f, Klez and Porndial.
- As of December 12, for 2003, Postini has quarantined over 16 billion
spam emails.
- 1 in 200 messages is infected with a virus.
- Spam activity has increased over 20 percent since January 2002.
- Postini filtered out and quarantined up to 90 million spam messages daily.
The company's rapid growth underscores both the increasing importance enterprises place on advanced email security and the effectiveness of Postini's solution in stopping spam, viruses and other threats. Awarded PC Magazine's Editors' Choice award for best corporate anti-spam service twice in 2003, Postini's flagship service, Perimeter Manager™ protects and secures email systems for over 2,000 enterprises and five million users from malicious email attacks including spam, viruses, and directory harvest attacks. The company also won Network World's Blue Ribbon Award for the top score in an anti-spam test in September, sweeping both the highest capture rate and lowest false positive rate categories. In addition, Postini achieved the highest score and the only Excellent rating on a comparative spam solutions review from InfoWorld in November.
About Postini
Postini, Inc. is the industry's leading provider of email security and
management services for the enterprise. Postini's flagship Perimeter Manager
protects and secures the email systems of over 2,000 companies from malicious
email attacks including spam, viruses, and Directory Harvest Attacks.
The Postini enterprise messaging security platform delivers 99.999% availability
and provides a comprehensive set of policy-based email filtering tools
and detailed real-time reports for email administrators who require the
highest level of visibility and control of their email systems. Postini
was founded in 1999 and is based in Redwood City, California. For more
information, contact Postini at 866.767.8461 or visit www.postini.com.
Postini is a registered trademark of Postini, Inc.
Marty Tacktill
Public Relations Manager
650.482.3197
650.482.3109 FAX
marty@postini.com
Bryan Ferraro
Neale-May & Partners
650.328.5555 ext. 277
bferraro@nealemay.com
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