Postini: May a Record Month for IM Attacks

June 7, 2006

Press Release — Postini, the global leader in Integrated Message Management, today announced that in May its systems registered a 138 percent increase in corporate Instant Messaging (IM) traffic and a 500 percent increase in Instant Messaging attacks, clearly demonstrating that hackers see the opportunity in compromising IM and underscoring the need for businesses to secure their networks from unwanted IM traffic. 

Postini stopped numerous IM viruses and worms such as Browaf, Tilebot, and Khoobe from infiltrating customers' networks.  Those customers cited assurance of threat prevention as the top benefit to using the Postini Perimeter Manager for IM service, followed by the visibility into, and control over, who within an organization is using public IM. 

"The fact that IM messages more than doubled in just one month shows the rate companies are adopting IM as a mainstream business communications tool," said Andrew Lochart, senior director of marketing for Postini.  "The sheer volume of IM attacks is a dramatic demonstration that we're in an environment where hackers, knowing that most organizations are still unprotected against IM malware, are rapidly adopting IM for their attacks. That being said, IM attacks are still only a fraction of the number of email attacks, so it's important companies keep up their guard on both fronts." 

In May, Postini also processed more than 25 billion email messages, a 13 percent increase from April, with more than 86 percent of all traffic being malicious or unwanted content.  Out of the 25 billion email messages processed by Postini's global data centers, 65 percent of those messages were rejected at the network layer, the only place to stop attacks like DHAs (directory harvest attacks) and DoS (denial of service), where there is no content in the body of the message to analyze with standard techniques. 

Postini continued to block all email-borne viruses for its customers, based on its patented PREEMPT

heuristic technology, as well multiple virus scan engines. The top five viruses for May were:

Virus Name	Quantity Blocked
MyTob Variants	5,206,192
Netsky	2,492,450
Swen	1,340,982
Mydoom	803,051
LovGate	788,252

Postini's StatTrak is available to users at http://www.postini.com/stats  and provides the most up-to-date statistics on the latest viruses, spam and DHAs.
Source: http://www.instantmessagingplanet.com/security/article.php/3611796