Commtouch Releases First Quarter 2008 Email Threat Report

RSA Conference 2008

Commtouch® (Nasdaq:CTCH) today released its Q1 2008 Email Threats Trend Report, based on the automated analysis of billions of email messages weekly. The report examines recent trends in email threats such as the use of legitimate third-party web sites and email messages to cloak spam and malware content.

Highlights of the report include:
Spam levels ranged between 60 and 94 percent of all email throughout the quarter
Malware distributors and spammers found ingenious ways to hide their unwanted messages within legitimate or legitimate-appearing web sites and messages
Spammers leveraged the high level of interest early in the quarter in mortgages, with mortgage refinancing spam jumping to 10% of all spam at its peak
Holidays continued to be celebrated in spam and malware, with outbreaks in honor of Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day and April Fools’ Day
On average throughout the quarter, 355,000 zombies were newly activated each day to participate in malicious activity

“Malicious emailers will use any freely available tool to their advantage, including Hotmail, Flickr, Blogspot and even Google and Yahoo calendar tools,” said Amir Lev, Commtouch’s chief technology officer and president. “Traditional content filtering tools are limited in the ways they can isolate the illegitimate emails that cloak their messages in legitimate content, since aggressive filtering will lead to false positives.”

Commtouch Recurrent Pattern Detection technology identifies and blocks these and other types of message subterfuge, keeping inboxes free of spam and malware.

More details, including samples of spam and malware messages are available in the Commtouch Q1 2008 Email Threats Trend Report, available from Commtouch Labs at: http://www.commtouch.com/downloads/Commtouch_2008_Q1_Email_Threats.pdf

NOTE: Reported global spam levels are based on Internet email traffic as measured from unfiltered data streams, not including internal corporate traffic. Therefore global spam levels will differ from the quantities reaching end user inboxes, due to several possible layers of filtering at the ISP level.

About Commtouch

Commtouch® (NASDAQ:CTCH) is the source of proven messaging and web security technology for scores of security companies and service providers, founded on a unique datacenter-based approach. Commtouch’s expertise in building efficient, massive-scale security services has resulted in its patented technology being used to mitigate Internet threats for thousands of organizations and hundreds of millions of users in over 100 countries. Commtouch’s Data Centers automatically analyze billions of transactions in real-time to identify new spam, malware and zombie outbreaks as they are initiated. Commtouch’s unmatched suite of security offerings – anti-spam, virus detection, reputation and zombie intelligence services – work together in a comprehensive feedback loop. Commtouch was founded in 1991, is headquartered in Netanya, Israel, and has a subsidiary in Sunnyvale, Calif. For more information and real-time statistics and trends, see: http://www.commtouch.com and the Commtouch Café blog at http://blog.commtouch.com/cafe.

Recurrent Pattern Detection, RPD, Zero-Hour and GlobalView are trademarks, and Commtouch is a registered trademark, of Commtouch Software Ltd. U.S. Patent No. 6,330,590 is owned by Commtouch.

NOTE: Commtouch Executives are meeting with members of the media during the RSA Security Conference April 7-11 at the Marriott Hotel, 55 4th Street, San Francisco. Contact Rebecca Herson 650-864-2112 for an appointment.

Contacts

Commtouch Software Ltd.
Rebecca Steinberg Herson, 650-864-2112 (US)
+972-54-444-2372 (Int’l)
rebeccah {at} commtouch(.)com