Posted: 06th Mar, 2006 By: MarkJ
Postini processed over 22bn emails in February and found that, after blocking 14bn as directory harvest / malicious attacks and mail to invalid recipients, SPAM totalled just over 4bn. This represented an increase of 2% over January, bringing the total amount of junk e-mail quarantined to 73% for the month:
The company also filtered 2.2 million instant messaging (IM) conversations in February, stopping such IM worms as FakeMSN, Lamo.Worm and Loxbot. Unchecked, these IM worms can install spyware, adware, keystroke loggers, and root kits on victims PCs.
Spam was most prevalent on February 18, with 150 million messages quarantined, accounting for 82 per cent of all messages stopped.
While spam was on the rise, viruses returned to their normal level of 1.5 per cent of all email in February, with Postini stopping a total of 40,185,146 viruses. Even the mywife virus (aka kama sutra, aka nyxem), which on February 3 threatened to delete files on infected computers, ranked only eighth on Postinis top ten viruses for the month.