Postini Reports Only 12% of All Email Messages Were Legitimate During the Month of November

Postini Reports Only 12% of All Email Messages Were Legitimate During the Month of November

Postini's Email Stat Track Data Shows Spam and Viruses on the Rise in November 2004

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Dec. 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Postini, the industry's leading provider of email security and management for the enterprise, today announced that only 12 percent of all email messages processed in November were legitimate, a two percent decrease from last month. Of the 6.9 billion messages processed by Postini, 88 percent were malicious attacks such as spam, phishing, viruses, and directory harvest attacks.

"As evidenced by the increase of email attacks at the connection level this month, spammers are getting smarter about how they approach their targets," said Andrew Lochart, director of product marketing at Postini. "It's for this reason Postini offers its users complete email boundary protection that goes well beyond simple content filtering to provide security at the connection level to reduce email intrusion threats early on. Simple content filtering alone is ineffective as a means of stopping spam and viruses."

Postini also prevented a total of 92 million virus instances from entering corporate networks. Viruses accounted for 1.3 percent of all email, with the bagle virus more than doubling from last month. Postini's top ten viruses of November were:

Virus Name Quantity Detected

netsky 26,767,864
bagle 20,747,683
sober 15,785,554
mime 11,954,343
zafi 5,881,507
mydoom 3,684,724
bankfraud 3,438,318
lovgate 1,673,707
bagz 746,278
dumaru 436,208



Postini also saw an increase in directory harvest attacks (DHAs), an attempt by spammers to hijack and steal an enterprises entire email directory and use it to send out junk email attacking corporate email servers. Postini fended off over 19 million DHAs.

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(TM) transport and content filtering technology to eliminate spam and viruses, stop DoS and directory harvest attacks, safeguard content, and improve email performance. Founded in 1999, Postini processes more than 2.4 billion message connections every week for more than 4,000 companies. By blocking spam, viruses and attacks before they can reach the enterprise email gateway, Postini Perimeter Manager is designed to assure complete email security while saving bandwidth, conserving server capacity and minimizing administrative costs. For more information contact Postini at its Redwood City, California headquarters toll-free at 866-767-8461, or visit www.postini.com.

CONTACT: Marty Tacktill of Postini, +1-650-482-3197, or marty@postini.com or Bryan Ferraro of Neale-May & Partners, or +1-650-328-5555, ext. 277, or bferraro@nealemay.com.


Source: Postini, Inc.

CONTACT: Marty Tacktill of Postini, +1-650-482-3197, or
marty@postini.com; or Bryan Ferraro of Neale-May & Partners, or
+1-650-328-5555, ext. 277, or bferraro@nealemay.com, for Postini

Web site: http://www.postini.com/


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