Press Release
POSTINI ANNOUNCES 2004 EMAIL SECURITY TRENDS AND SPAM PREDICTIONS FOR THE NEW YEAR
Postini Predicts Legitimate Email Will Drop From 12% To 8% of All Email in 2005
REDWOOD CITY, CA , December 15, 2004 — Postini, the industry's leading provider of email security and management for the enterprise, today announced that the 2004 spam war changed from a content filtering battle to a real time SMTP connection management battle. This year alone, Postini processed 95 billion SMTP requests and blocked over 40% of those requests based on the IP address of the sender before the threats could reach corporate firewalls.
"It's obvious by the amount of SMTP requests we blocked this year that security at the connection level is the best way for corporations to stop spam and virus threats," said Scott Petry, founder and senior vice president of products and engineering at Postini. " Content filtering by itself is ineffective. As spammers get more sophisticated, customers like to know they are protected at the connection level."
In 2004 Postini also saw an increase in directory harvest attacks (DHAs), an attempt by spammers to hijack and steal an enterprise's email directory to send out spam. Postini protected its customers from over 164 million DHAs and blocked over 38 billion invalid delivery attempts.
This past year saw the amount of legitimate email drop from 22% to just 12%, while viruses rose over the past year from roughly half a percent to one and a half percent according to Postini's Email Stat Track. The virus infection average ratio during 2004 was 1 in 67, compared to 2003, when 1 in 200 messages were infected with a virus. Towards the end of the year viruses were infecting 1 in 25 emails.
Currently, the company processes over 2.4 billion email messages per week, and quarantines 88 percent of the messages as spam or viruses for leading corporations and enterprises.
Postini's Top Five 2005 Spam and Email Security Predictions
- Legitimate email will drop from 12% to 8% of all email.
- Directory harvest attacks will increase 25% while most victims won't realize they've been attacked.
- "Phishing" — fraudulent email used to steal the recipient's identity information — will rise significantly as well, recasting spam as a damaging activity rather than a nuisance.
- Connection blocking technology will play an increasingly important role in protecting users from email threats of all types.
- Corporations will continue to switch to managed perimeter defense services to protect employees from email-borne attacks.
Postini's rapid growth from 2,000 customers in December 2003 to 4,500 customers in December 2004 underscores both the increasing importance enterprises place on advanced email security and the effectiveness of Postini's solution in stopping spam, viruses and other threats. Awarded a U.S. patent in March 2004 for its "preprocessing electronic messaging solution," Perimeter Manager™ protects and secures email systems for over 6 million global users from malicious email attacks including spam, viruses, phishing and directory harvest 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™ 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.
Postini is a registered trademark of Postini, Inc.
Marty Tacktill
Senior Director, Worldwide Public Relations
650.482.3197
650.482.3109 FAX
marty@postini.com
Kimberly Canedo
Neale-May & Partners
650.328.5555 ext. 278
kcanedo@nealemay.com
