Postini: Spammers Attacks Against Corporate Email Increase

Postini (www.postini.com), a provider of email security and management for the enterprise, today announced that directory harvest attacks (DHAs) by spammer against corporate email reached record levels in February.

Postini also reported that unwanted email has remained virtually unchanged at 88 percent while only 12 percent of all email is legitimate. Postini's findings are based on the 14.8 billion messages it processed in February.

DHAs are brute force attempts by spammers to find valid e-mail addresses where the spammer connects to business's e-mail server and guesses addresses until he gets some right. Those addresses are then harvested for use in later spam campaigns.

"February was the worst month ever for DHAs," said Andrew Lochart, director of product marketing for Postini. "In fact, the five worst days ever recorded by Postini were in February. The average Postini customer was attacked 224 times per day, with each attack comprising 166 invalid message delivery attempts. That total of 37,184 invalid delivery attempts per day could have crippled customer email servers if left unchecked."

The company protected its customers from over 25 million DHAs that attempted 4.2 billion invalid delivery attempts during the month.

Despite the rash of new viruses that were detected in February, the percentage of email infected with a virus actually fell slightly in February from 0.9 percent to 0.7 percent.

Postini's managed services model uses patented preEMPT™ preemptive email protection technology to protect enterprise email at the perimeter, stopping spam and viruses before they enter the network.

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.