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Report: Spam Percentage Holding Steady, Viruses Down, Other E-mail Attacks on the Rise

Report urges network administrators to protect against directory harvest attacks

Postini announced that unwanted e-mail has remained virtually unchanged at 88 percent while only 12 percent of all e-mail is legitimate based on the 14.7 billion messages the company processed in January.

Postini continued to see a rise in directory harvest attacks (DHAs), an attempt by spammers to steal an enterprise's e-mail directory and use it to send out junk e-mail. The company protected its customers from over 26 million DHAs that attempted 4.8 billion invalid delivery attempts during the month.

In January, Postini saw a reduction in the number of viruses, with the percentage of viruses dropping from 1.7 percent in December 2004, to 0.9 percent in the first month of 2005.

"Companies need to be aware of how much unwanted e-mail isn't spam, per se, but is actually directory harvest attack messages," said Andrew Lochart, Postini's director of product marketing.

"Of the 88 percent of messages that were bad, 32 percent were DHA delivery attempts. These messages would go undetected by spam filters that only look at content."

Postini also announced in January the release of a landmark annual report, highlighting the trends over the last year and predictions for the year ahead in spam, viruses, and e-mail security. A copy of the report is available for download here.

Postini's managed services model uses patented Preemptive E-mail Protection technology to protect enterprise servers and desktops at the perimeter, stopping spam and viruses before they enter the network. The solution handles enterprise e-mail system security and management, offering spam and virus filtering, content and policy management, disaster recovery, industry specific content filtering, and protection from e-mail attacks such as directory harvest attacks and e-mail denial of service attacks. Postini processes approximately 3 billion message connections each week through its array of distributed data centers, five times more than any other e-mail security services provider, making Postini the fourth-largest e-mail system in the world.

Postini's E-mail Stat Track is available to users and provides the most up-to-date statistics on the latest viruses, spam and DHA attacks.
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