Information security attack summary: January

Postini, the provider of e-mail security and management for the enterprise, has announced that unwanted e-mail has remained virtually unchanged at 88 percent while only 12 percent of all e-mail is legitimate. Postini's findings are based on the 14.7 billion messages it processed in January.

Postini continued to see a rise in directory harvest attacks (DHAs), an attempt by spammers to steal an enterprise's e-mail directory and use it to send out junk e-mail. The company protected its customers from over 26 million DHAs that attempted 4.8 billion invalid delivery attempts during the month.

In January, Postini saw a reduction in the number of viruses, with the percentage of viruses dropping from 1.7 percent in December 2004, to 0.9 percent. The top ten viruses were:

1. netsky
2. sober
3. mime
4. zafi
5. bagle
6. bankfraud
7. lovgate
8. mydoom
9. new malware-e
10. klez

"Companies need to be aware of how much unwanted e-mail isn't spam, per se, but is actually directory harvest attack messages," said 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."

•Date: 4th February 2005 • Region: World •Type: Article •Topic: ISM
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