While Netsky continues dominance of malware league tables

October 2004 (Newstream) -- Spammers' antics are ruining brands' reputations on the web, according to a recent roundtable of leading industry experts and anti-spam campaigners hosted by e-security specialists Clearswift. The results of this month's spam index also support this, with healthcare suppliers' brands continuing to be hardest hit by spam peddling illicit medicinal offers. 

Spammers are confusing consumers by intentionally blurring the boundaries between legitimate email and unsolicited communications selling counterfeit goods. This has infuriated the direct marketing industries, who are relied upon to maintain brands' online presence, yet find themselves tarred with the same brush as unscrupulous cybercriminals. 

Clearswift's latest spam index reveals that healthcare spam has risen to account for 57.6% of all spam. In fact Pfizer, who manufacture the male impotency drug Viagra, have vowed to take legal action against spammers, after recently finding that 25% of men believed Pfizer themselves were responsible for sending Viagra spam. However spam is not only damaging to the health of consumers and pharmaceutical brands - scams related to other online retailers have also seen a dramatic increase. If this trend continues, it threatens to erode trust and damage the UK's digital economy. 

"Pfizer has set a precedent, but we are likely to see other companies declaring war on spammers for undermining their products," comments Alyn Hockey, Director of Research at Clearswift. "Suing such websites or seizing domain names may be harsh yet necessary routes where finding long term solutions are concerned - until then we have to rely on technology, taking a multi-layered approach to content security in the fight against spam." 

The roundtable panel, including Spamhaus, the Direct Marketing Association, and the DTI, agreed that while education and legislation were vital, effort to date had only minimal impact in stemming the tide and technology remained our best defense against spam. 

The continued dominance of healthcare spam is revealed in the breakdown attached. 

According to Clearswift's virus index, the numbers of Win32 malware viruses have seen significant growth over the last month, yet few managed to make any significant impact. Exceptions were variants of MyDoom, Bagle and Lovegate that reached medium-rated levels of outbreak. However, Bagle and Mydoom tend to be comparatively short-lived. Zafi.B remains on the radar. Despite the arrest of Sven Jaschan, the author of the Netsky and Sasser worms five months ago, Netsky.P still rides high as the undisputed leader of the malware league tables. 

See image for details. 

About the spam and virus indexes: 
The spam categorization statistics were extracted from the millions of spam emails harvested by Clearswift's seed accounts on a weekly basis. They are collated and analyzed using Clearswift's' spamActive service, which is an integral component of the multi-layered anti-spam protection offered by MIMEsweeper for SMTP 5.0. Updated eight times daily, spamActive routinely extracts spam terms, sender domains, URL's and subject lines, which can be automatically downloaded to updates customers' email policies. The virus statistics are generated using raw data from Clearswift's e-Sweeper(tm), a managed email content security solution for service providers. 

About Clearswift: 
Clearswift secures content and protects against digital attacks by enforcing security policies that increase productivity, reduce IT costs and create a safer business environment. Its world leading business is founded on providing Total Content Security for email and web. 

The Internet is the greatest business tool ever invented, but with it comes a harrowing collection of threats. Protecting against the circulation of inappropriate images and text, spam, breaches of confidentiality, and viruses is now mission critical. 

Clearswift enables organizations to protect themselves against digital attacks, meet legal and regulatory requirements, implement productivity-saving policies and manage intellectual property passing through their network. 

About MIMEsweeperTM for SMTP 5.0 
MIMEsweeper for SMTP 5.0 is the most comprehensive enterprise class email content security solution available in the market, delivering the best scalability and robustness anywhere. It is a best of breed solution that counters all content security threats - spam, viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and DOS attacks, while allowing companies to remain compliant and meet best practice standards. 

MIMEsweeper allows consistent policy definition and enforcement, through automated policy replication. This new version incorporates a 'roles-based' approach to administration too, moving mail management from back office to the front office. This allows, for example, the HR department - rather than IT - to implement company mail policy on, say, profanity, sexism or racism. Its unique approach to system management allows for hierarchical devolvement of duties to multiple administrators. IT managers can delegate specific responsibilities, such as server monitoring, access to particular quarantine areas and reporting, to the most appropriate administrators or department, therefore spreading the load of administration and significantly reducing the time it takes to process blocked emails. 

About e-SweeperTM: 
e-Sweeper is a managed email content security solution for service providers. Experienced professionals handle protection from content threats at the email gateway, freeing the organization from the cost of implementing the hardware, software and administration expertise necessary to effectively stop the myriad of content security threats. 

Clearswift, MAILsweeper, MIMEsweeper, spamActive and ENTERPRISEsuite are trademarks or registered trademarks, in the United States, United Kingdom and certain other countries, of Clearswift Limited. Additional company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of the individual companies and are respectfully acknowledged. 

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Produced for Clearswift

Contact:
Susan Majerus
480/354-4334
susanm@intelecgroup.com

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