Postini Reports 90 Percent Decrease in Phishing Attacks in August

Postini Reports 90 Percent Decrease in Phishing Attacks in August

Viruses Also Down 30 Percent Over July Figures

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Sept. 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Postini, the industry's leading provider of email security and management services, today announced that phishing attempts and viruses in August were significantly lower than they were in July. Postini processed over 14 billion emails in August and found that the number of phishing instances totaled 1,843,272, a 90 percent decrease compared to July.

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. With consumers' personal information, tech-criminals then commit credit-card fraud, identity theft and even perform unauthorized bank account transfers.

"Phishing is still a new enough phenomenon that we are not surprised to see this kind of month to month fluctuation," said Andrew Lochart, senior director of marketing for Postini. "This drop off in August should not give people a false sense of security and cause them to let their defenses down."

Along with decreased phishing, the number of virus infected messages for the month of August decreased for the second month in a row, a drop of 27 percent compared to July. Postini prevented a total of 49 million virus instances from entering corporate networks. The company also protected its customers from more than 21 million directory harvest attacks (DHAs), a six percent decrease compared to July's 23 million DHAs. Legitimate email as a percentage of total SMTP connections increased from 12 percent in July to 13.4 percent in August. Spam rates remained somewhat stable, representing 86.6 percent of the total number of email messages sent. Only 13.4 percent of all messages were legitimate email.

The top ten viruses for August were:

Virus Name Quantity Detected

mytob 27,405,821
netsky 8,487,939
bagle 4,492,758
mime 4,132,876
mydoom 1,317,800
zafi 1,004,459
lovgate 768,987
bankfraud 460,818
ebscam 324,110
backdoor-ceb 191,899

Postini's StatTrak(TM) is available to users at http://www.postini.com/stats and provides the most up-to-date statistics on the latest viruses, spam and DHA attacks.

About Postini

Postini, the global leader in secure email boundary services, stops spam and viruses, enforces policy compliance and improves email manageability. Postini's managed service model stops threats before they reach your network. For more information contact Postini at 866-767-8461, or visit http://www.postini.com/.

Media Contacts:
Marty Tacktill Kimberly Canedo
Postini Neale-May & Partners
(650) 482-3197 (650) 328-5555 ext. 278
marty@postini.comkcanedo@nealemay.com

Source: Postini

CONTACT: Marty Tacktill of Postini, +1-650-482-3197, marty@postini.com,
or Kimberly Canedo of Neale-May & Partners for Postini, +1-650-328-5555
ext. 278, kcanedo@nealemay.com

Web site: http://www.postini.com/
http://www.postini.com/stats

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