CipherTrust Tracks a Record 250,000 New Zombies Per Day
Sober Outbreak Pushes November to the Worst Month of Spam in 2005
ATLANTA—December 5, 2005—CipherTrust, Inc., the global market leader in messaging security, today released findings based on an analysis of messaging activity collected from its global network of award-winning IronMail® gateway security appliances. CipherTrust® declared November the worst month yet in 2005 in terms of spam volumes and floods proliferating on the Internet. This dramatic increase is primarily attributed to the latest Sober virus outbreak, which to date accounts for more than 500,000 total infections since the variant’s outbreak.
IDC recently reported spam as the third highest concern for IT administrators today, up from number seven from the previous year1. The impact of the volume increases during November confirms the significant threat presented by increasing volumes of spam. Based on data received from more than 4,000 IronMail appliances deployed globally, CipherTrust Research indicated significant volume increases in the amount of spam, including:
- On November 3, a spike in spam introduced by Mytob and Bagle outbreaks made its way around the Internet and raised the global volume of e-mail over eight percent overnight.
- On November 21, the most recent outbreak of Sober pushed its way through the e-mail ecosystem bringing with it thousands of new infected zombies that caused more than a 15 percent increase in the amount of spam.
- Over the past two weeks, this swell has held up with overall e-mail volume over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend up 25 percent over that of the previous weekend.
- Over the last six months, CipherTrust’s TrustedSource™ global threat correlation engine had been identifying an average of 170,000 new infected zombie computers each day. Since the Sober outbreak, the number of new zombies sending spam and virus messages increased by nearly 50 percent, bringing the average total number to more than 250,000 new infected IPs each day.
“While the late summer showed some signs of spam volume declines, November started on quite a different note,” said Dr. Paul Judge, chief technology officer at CipherTrust. “The propagation of these threats proves spammers and attackers continue to be as malicious as ever. This is particularly true as the exponential increase in unwanted e-mail costs money in wasted bandwidth capacity, storage, and dangerous payloads, as well as valuable administration and employee time. CipherTrust continues to develop innovative technologies and provide organizations with a comprehensive approach to blocking unwanted messages, helping to eliminate those threats.”
Organizations must implement layered security strategies, including both at the gateway and network perimeter, to protect against the increasing volumes of spam and the number of new zombies sending viruses, worms and phishing attacks. CipherTrust’s TrustedSource reputation system is the first and only reputation system to combine traffic data, global behavior and sending patterns, network characteristics and other detection techniques with global enterprise data. When combining this global view with local message analysis at the gateway, CipherTrust provides the most precise, comprehensive protection against spam, zombies and other blended threats.
For additional information on CipherTrust Research and up-to-date information on the latest messaging security threats, please visit CipherTrust’s TrustedSource Portal™ located at http://www.trustedsource.org.
About CipherTrust, Inc.
CipherTrust, Inc., the global market leader in messaging security, provides innovative layered security offerings to stop inbound messaging threats such as spam, viruses, intrusions and phishing, and protect against outbound policy and compliance violations. CipherTrust’s integrated best-of-breed capabilities deliver maximum availability and unmatched security, effectiveness and enterprise manageability across multiple communication channels. Recognized by IDC as the market leader for secure content management appliances in 2004, CipherTrust protects the messaging infrastructure of more than 1,800 customers worldwide, including more than one-third of the Fortune 500. CipherTrust is backed by top-tier investors including Battery Ventures and Greylock Partners. For more information about CipherTrust, please visit www.ciphertrust.com or call 877-448-8625.
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The following are either trademarks or registered trademarks of CipherTrust, Inc. in the United States or other countries or both: CipherTrust, IronMail, TrustedSource and TrustedSource Portal. Other company, product or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.
1. IDC, Worldwide Secure Content Management 2005-2009 Forecast Update and 2004 Vendor Shares: Spyware, Spam, and Malicious Code Continue to Wreak Havoc, Doc #34023, November 2005.
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