Postini, a provider of email security and management software, today reported spam accounted for approximately 78% of all email processed by Postini in May, the same percentage as April 2004.
However, Postini did see a rise in viruses and directory harvest attacks (DHAs), an attempt by spammers to hijack and steal an enterprise’s entire email directory and use it to send out junk email attacking corporate email servers.
Testifying before a Senate committee hearing on the effect of the CAN SPAM act in late May, Shinya Akamine, president and CEO of Postini said there has been no reduction in the amount of spam since the act was passed and that spammers are modifying their messages to defeat traditional anti-spam technologies.
“Since the enactment of CAN-SPAM, we’ve seen spam on a daily basis rise to 83% of all email,” said Akamine. “Spam is becoming more personalized and unique as spammers begin to put less and less content in their messages, making it imperative that companies deploy solutions that analyze SMTP connection behavior as well as message content.”
In May Postini processed over 5.7 billion messages, of which, 107,901,554 contained viruses
Postini’s top-ten viruses of May were: netsky, objectdata, sober, mime, bagle, lovgate, klez, dumaru, mydoom, and mhtredir.
This article was compiled and edited by CIO Update staff. Please direct any
questions regarding its content to Allen Bernard, Managing Editor.