According to Postini, a major provider of email security and management, phishing remains one of the major e-mail threats continuing to plague enterprise networks, despite a 45% month-to-month decrease in April phishing attempts.
Phishing is a scam in which the perpetrator sends out legitimate-looking emails appearing to come from legitimate e-commerce sites in an effort to obtain personal and financial information from the recipient.
“The good news is that phishing attempts and email viruses declined in April,” said Andrew Lochart, senior director of marketing for Postini. “The bad news is that despite the decrease, these email threats remain a major concern for corporations, costing valuable time, money and resources.”
Postini also reported that the number of directory harvest attacks (DHAs) by spammers against corporate email remained steady during the month of April, while the number of virus-infected messages decreased by 30%.
Postini processed 14.9 billon messages in April and 87% were spam, including phishing, viruses, DHAs and other email threats. Only 13% of all messages were legitimate email.
“Due to the unpredictability of spammers,” continued Lochart, “the increase and decrease of email threats from month to month is normal. Spammers constantly shift techniques, leading to not only changes in the frequency, but also in the composition of junk messages.”