Postini, a provider of enterprise email security and management, said yesterday that only 12% 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% were spam, phishing, viruses or 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.
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 and quantity detected:
Postini also saw an increase in 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.
Postini’s Email Stat Track is available to users at www.postini.com/stats.