February 2, 2005 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Email security and management provider Postini (postini.com) announced on Tuesday that spam mail accounted for 88 percent of all emails, while only 12 percent was legitimate, according to data gathered from the 14.7 billion messages processed by the company in January.
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Postini says that directory harvest attacks, in which spammers try to steal enterprise email directories and exploit them to send out junk email, continue to rise. The company says it blocked over 26 million DHAs from attempting some 4.8 billion invalid delivery attempts to its customers during the month.
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Postini’s report showed the number of viruses reduced significantly from December to January, with the percentage of viruses lowering from 1.7 percent in December 2004, to 0.9 percent. The top ten viruses were: netsky; sober; mime; zafi; bagle; bankfraud; lovgate; mydoom; new malware; and klez. Postini also announced the release of its annual report, highlighting 2004′s trends and 2005 forecasts for spam, viruses, and email security.
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“Companies need to be aware of how much unwanted email isn’t spam, per se, but is actually directory harvest attack messages,” says 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.”
