Only 12% of E-mail Messages Sent in November Were Legitimate, Analysis Finds

Only 12 percent of all e-mail messages Postini processed in November were legitimate, the company said, two percent less than in October. Of the 6.9 billion messages processed by Postini, 88 percent were malicious attacks such as spam, phishing, viruses, and directory harvest attacks.

"As evidenced by the increase of e-mail attacks at the connection level this month, spammers are getting smarter about how they approach their targets," said Andrew Lochart, director of product marketing at Postini.

Postini also prevented a total of 92 million virus instances from entering corporate networks. Viruses accounted for 1.3 percent of all e-mail, with the bagle virus more than doubling from last month. Postini's top ten viruses of November were:

• netsky with 26,767,864 infected messages
• bagle with 20,747,683 infected messages
• sober with 15,785,554 infected messages
• mime with 11,954,343 infected messages
• zafi with 5,881,507 infected messages
• mydoom with 3,684,724 infected messages
• bankfraud with 3,438,318 infected messages
• lovgate with 1,673,707 infected messages
• bagz with 746,278 infected messages
• dumaru with 436,208 infected messages

Postini also saw an increase in directory harvest attacks (DHAs), an attempt by spammers to hijack and steal an enterprises entire e-mail directory and use it to send out junk e-mail attacking corporate e-mail servers. Postini fended off over 19 million DHAs.

Available online, Postini's E-mail Stat Trackprovides the most up-to-date statistics on the latest viruses, spam and DHA attacks.