August Is the Hottest Month for Spam as Volumes Peak at 90 Per cent
September 9, 2004 – FrontBridge Technologies Inc., the leader in enterprise message management and email security, today released its latest statistics on business email. Spam volume peaked at a record-high 90 per cent in August 2004, topping a previous 2004 high of 85 per cent set in June. The statistic on spam volume was compiled by a specialised spam analyst team, crunching network traffic data for more than 2,200 enterprise customers representing over 15,000 email domains.
FrontBridge’s spam and virus analyst team reviewed 3.1 billion messages in August. Over the course of the month, FrontBridge blocked 2.5 billion spam messages and 34 million viruses infected emails. Spam volume hit the 90 per cent high on August 30. These percentages can in part be attributed to spam associated with back-to-school offers and a flood of politically motivated email.
Since FrontBridge first began filtering spam in 2000, the volume of spam has grown by an astounding 1600 per cent. Furthermore, by some estimates, the amount of spam will triple over the next three years. This deluge of unwanted email translates into loss of employee productivity, potential legal liabilities and direct infrastructure and security costs to the corporations that are being targeted by spammers.
August was another month where viruses were running rampant. Among the 34 million viruses caught, the most widespread virus captured by FrontBridge was Zerolin-C. This virus exploits system or Windows software vulnerabilities by accessing a remote Web site by means of an HTTP IFRAME exploit. This virus also carries the aliases of TrojanDropper.VBS. Zerolin and HTML_ZEROLIN.B.
FrontBridge’s anti-virus partnerships with Sophos, Symantec, and Trend Micro provide worldwide coverage and the ability to react much more quickly to virus outbreaks by providing rapid updates every ten minutes and making changes to the network to block malicious content within minutes of an attack being detected. FrontBridge scans emails for viruses before messages reach the corporate network, ensuring that viruses and malicious code never touch its customer’s infrastructure.
About FrontBridge Technologies
FrontBridge Technologies Inc. is the market leader for enterprise message management and security services. Its comprehensive portfolio of managed services include spam filtering, virus protection, policy enforcement, disaster recovery, secure email and message archiving. FrontBridge managed services are delivered across the company’s SMART network – a proven, reliable, on-demand, globally-distributed network of secure data centres. FrontBridge was the first company to guarantee 99.999-percent service level agreements (SLA) and the only company with a track record of 100-percent uptime.
Now in its fifth year of operation, FrontBridge, headquartered in Marina del Rey, Calif., provides message management and security for more than 2,200 enterprises globally. Visit us on the Web at www.FrontBridge.com or call 877.301.8232 or in the UK, +44 20 7872.5417
SMART Network and TrueProtect are trademarks of FrontBridge Technologies.