Excedent Upgrades Email Hosting Platform, Defeats MyDoom.A Performance, Security and Scalability Highlight Latest Improvements

HostReview.com
Thursday, January 29, 2004; 12:00 AM

Vienna, Virginia (January 29, 2004) - Excedent Technologies, the leader in managed email hosting and security threat prevention for service providers, today announced the upgrade of its Linux-based email hosting platform. The company has improved its scaling architecture and security software, providing customers with performance boosts and extra protection from harmful viruses and unwanted emails. The company also passed the first major test of the year, protecting all customers from the MyDoom (W32.MyDoom.A, otherwise known as Shimgapi or Novarg) worm, already proclaimed by many experts to be the fastest spreading virus ever.

"With the exponential growth of Spam and computer viruses over the last 12 months, we realized the need to improve our scaling architecture in order to prepare for the long term and provide maximum performance capabilities to our customers," commented Bill Boebel, CTO at Excedent. "Our gateway and mail servers are now able to process email and filter junk with greater efficiency, improving the overall speed and performance of our hosted email and security platform. This upgrade was a great success and the many improvements will allow us to further scale the system as our customer base grows and security threats continue to worsen."

MyDoom hit the Internet on Monday with blazing speed, spreading through computer networks across the world. "We have not seen a virus of this magnitude and volume since Sobig.F last August," explained Boebel. "We have been blocking an average of 250,000 infected emails per day and the filtering performance in our new email architecture has been outstanding."

This is the third major computer virus of 2004, but many experts claim this to be the worst. According to F-Secure, a leading anti-virus software company, MyDoom is a worm that mails itself to e-mail addresses and arrives with an attachment bearing either a .exe, .scr, .zip, or .pif extension. The worm also spreads over email and Kazaa P2P networks. When executed, the worm opens up Windows' Notepad with garbage data in it. In emails, it uses variable subjects, bodies and attachment names. The virus is programmed to stop spreading on February 12th.