The Monthly Message Security & Management Update for July, from Postini, confirms a 160 percent increase over June in instant messaging (IM) attacks against corporate networks. In July, Postini detected and prevented new IM threats including Prokeylogger, which logs the keystrokes typed by the user, captures passwords and screenshots, and sends them to identity thieves.
Also noted in July a continuing rise in encrypted email traffic, as organizations around the world increasingly use encryption to protect sensitive communications with their business partners, contractors, regulators and remote employees. Postini processed more than 325 million encrypted messages in July, representing eight percent of all valid email messages and a 13 percent increase in encrypted traffic over the prior month.
The ability to encrypt email, based on an industry standard called Transport Layer Security (TLS), is built into every modern email server and is easy and free to use. Postini research shows that while the use of TLS to encrypt email messages continues to increase month over month, today nearly 90 percent of businesses worldwide have simply failed to turn on the TLS functionality available to them for free on their email servers.
Postini takes TLS one step further by allowing companies to guarantee secured email exchange with anyone – both for trusted business partners and for recipients whose encryption support is unknown. This is important because standard TLS will revert to unencrypted communication if the recipient email server does not have TLS enabled. Postini can prevent this from happening, guaranteeing that no sensitive messages are ever sent in the clear over the Internet.
In July, Postini processed more than 26 billion SMTP email connections with 62 percent blocked as Directory Harvest Attacks (DHAs) and other messages sent to non-existent recipients. Six billion messages were blocked as spam, an average of 77 percent of all email scanned. Utilizing its patented PREEMPT™ heuristic technology, Postini blocked more than 26 million viruses in July.
The top five viruses for July were:
Virus Name __________ Quantity Blocked
Bagle _______________ 4,750,765
Netsky ______________ 4,486,709
Mytob _______________ 3,442,408
Mime _______________ 2,660,331
Mydoom ______________ 1,562,106
Postini's StatTrak™ is available at www.postini.com/stats and provides the most up-to-date statistics on the latest viruses, spam and DHAs.
Although Online Content Aggregators are in the early experimentation stages of rolling out video services, they will have some dramatic revenue-generating opportunities in the next five years, reports In-Stat (http://www.in-stat.com). The worldwide market for online content services is expected to expand by a factor of 10, growing from about 13 million households during 2005 to more than 131 million households by 2010, the high-tech market research firm says.
Scientists at Microsoft Corp. are developing new techniques for analyzing search click-through patterns and browsing behaviors to make search results more relevant. Microsoft researchers Eugene Agichtein, Eric Brill, Susan Dumais and Robert Ragno report that accurate modeling and interpretation of user interactions with a search engine can significantly improve search-result ranking, the detection of “click-spam,” Web search personalization and, ultimately, the overall Web search experience. While user interactions with the Web search engines are plentiful, new robust techniques are required to understand the relationship between user interactions and result quality.
The W3C announced the