Postini Reports SPAM Percentage Holding Steady

Postini (www.postini.com), a provider of email security and management for the enterprise, today announced that unwanted email has remained virtually unchanged at 88 percent while only 12 percent of all email is legitimate. Postini's findings www.postini.com/whitepapers/?WPID=25 are based on the 14.7 billion messages it processed in January.

Postini continued to see a rise in directory harvest attacks (DHAs), an attempt by spammers to steal an enterprise's email directory and use it to send out junk email. 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. The top ten viruses were:

Virus Name
1. netsky
2. sober
3. mime
4. zafi
5. bagle
6. bankfraud
7. lovgate
8. mydoom
9. new malware-e
10. klez

"Companies need to be aware of how much unwanted email 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 email security.

Postini's managed services model uses patented Preemptive Email Protection technology to protect enterprise servers and desktops at the perimeter, stopping spam and viruses before they enter the network.

The solution handles enterprise email system security and management, offering spam and virus filtering, content and policy management, disaster recovery, industry specific content filtering, and protection from email attacks such as directory harvest attacks and email denial of service attacks.

Postini's Email Stat Track is available to users at www.postini.com/stats and provides the most up-to-date statistics on the latest viruses, spam and DHA attacks. About Postini

Postini, Inc. is the leading provider of email security and management services that protect email infrastructure by preventing spam and attacks from reaching the enterprise gateway.

Postini's patented managed services model utilizes exclusive preEMPT ä transport and content filtering technology to eliminate spam and viruses, stop DoS and directory harvest attacks, safeguard content, and improve email performance.