Dramatic increase in spam, viuses and other unwanted emails

Spam, viruses and other malicious email have increased dramatically in the last few months, even above the levels from the Storm virus attack of 2007. Postini data centers, the email filtering system provided by Design One Corporation, blocked more than 100 million viruses every day during the height of a virus attack in recent months. The majority (over 50%) of these viruses delivered through fake notices of underreported income from the IRS. Another large contingent of virus-infected emails included false package tracking attachments. Spammers also sent an email that asked for the recipient’s user name and password to their webmail account, and then used the compromised account to generate even more spam.Early Detection is essential to prevent spam and virus emails from overwhelming the network servers. For example, in the last 12 months, the Postini Early Detection Feature bounced over 5 gigabytes of emails before they reached our clients Internet portals. If this volume of emails had reached the servers, the users on the client system would have experienced periodic slowdowns in the access of programs and files on the network.
The Early Detection feature also provides protection against emerging viruses/malware that are not yet captured in a virus definition file. Incoming messages that contain suspicious content are temporarily quarantined for deeper analysis and rescanned by the service’s antivirus engines with updated signatures. Early Detection targets messages with executable file attachments and messages that trigger the advanced anti-virus heuristics filter. From our observations, we found that Early Detection successfully identifies and blocks zero-hour viruses in customer environments.

If your system is not fully protected from against the assault from spam and viruses, please contact Allen Shapiro at Design One Corporation for further information. We will be pleased to review your system and provide advice, at no charge, on how to protect your files from being infected and your network from being overwhelmed by the assault from spam and viruses.