"It's obvious by the amount of SMTP requests we blocked this year that security at the connection level is the best way for corporations to stop spam and virus threats," said Scott Petry, founder and senior vice president of products and engineering at Postini. "Content filtering by itself is ineffective. As spammers get more sophisticated, customers like to know they are protected at the connection level."
In 2004 the company also saw an increase in directory harvest attacks (DHAs), an attempt by spammers to hijack and steal an enterprise's e-mail directory to send out spam. It protected its customers from over 164 million DHAs and blocked over 38 billion invalid delivery attempts.
This past year saw the amount of legitimate e-mail drop from 22% to just 12%, while viruses rose over the past year from roughly half a percent to one and a half percent according to the company's E-mail Stat Track. The virus infection average ratio during 2004 was 1 in 67, compared to 2003, when 1 in 200 messages were infected with a virus. Towards the end of the year viruses were infecting 1 in 25 e-mails.
Currently, the company processes over 2.4 billion e-mail messages per week, and quarantines 88 percent of the messages as spam or viruses for leading corporations and enterprises.
Postini's Top Five 2005 Spam and E-mail Security Predictions:
- Legitimate e-mail will drop from 12% to 8% of all e-mail.
- 2. Directory harvest attacks will increase 25% while most victims won't realize they've been attacked.
- "Phishing" -- fraudulent e-mail used to steal the recipient's identity information -- will rise significantly as well, recasting spam as a damaging activity rather than a nuisance.
- Connection blocking technology will play an increasingly important role in protecting users from e-mail threats of all types.
- Corporations will continue to switch to managed perimeter defense services to protect employees from e-mail-borne attacks.
