Sunnyvale, Calif., July 17, 2007 – Commtouch® (NASDAQ: CTCH), today released its Email Threats Trend Report for the second quarter of 2007, based on the company’s real-time analysis of billions of email messages globally each week.. Highlights include:
“The same botnets used to spew spam are being used to send malware-infected email,” reported Amir Lev, Commtouch President and CTO. “The email-borne malware sent by botnets can steal password and personal data, harvest email addresses and sometimes even launch a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The fact that the same bots are being used for all types of malicious activities is evidence that the enemies have converged.”
Spammers unveiled a new email tactic toward the end of the quarter: PDF spam. This type of spam aims to evade anti-spam filters by disguising itself in a common format: attachments of the familiar Portable Document Format files. This trick helps the junk message pass many anti-spam solutions since it looks like a legitimate email.
“PDF spam is the latest trick the spammers have come up with to evade traditional anti-spam filters,” Lev continued. “It took a bit of time, but some anti-spam engines eventually developed solutions to block the image-based spam that plagued inboxes last year. In response, the spammers quickly utilized their zombie infrastructure to progress into sending spam in a different format. This shows once again that technologies that try to fight spam one trick at a time will always lag far behind, leaving them unprepared when the next spam tidal wave hits.”
More details, including samples of PDF spam and spam messages containing malware, are available in the Commtouch Q2 2007 Email Threats Trends Report, available from Commtouch Labs at: http://www.commtouch.com/documents/Commtouch_2007_Q2_Email_Threats.pdf.
Commtouch’s Recurrent Pattern Detection (RPD) technology protects against spam and virus attacks in real-time as they are mass-distributed over the Internet. The unique content-agnostic technology detects and blocks spam in any language and is highly effective against image-based and PDF spam. Commtouch’s Reputation Service dynamically blocks spam at the network perimeter based on the reputation of the sender.
Commtouch Software Ltd. (NASDAQ: CTCH) is dedicated to protecting and preserving the integrity of the world's most important communications tool -- e-mail. Commtouch has over 16 years of experience developing messaging software and is a global developer and provider of proprietary anti-spam, Zero-Hour virus protection and Reputation Service solutions. Using core technologies including RPD (Recurrent Pattern Detection™), the Commtouch Detection Center analyzes billions of email messages per week to identify new spam and malware outbreaks within minutes of their introduction into the Internet. Integrated by scores of OEM partners, Commtouch technology protects thousands of organizations, with hundreds of millions of users in over 100 countries. Commtouch is headquartered in Netanya, Israel, and has a subsidiary in Sunnyvale, Calif. For more information, see: http://www.commtouch.com. The site includes the Commtouch online lab detailing spam statistics and charts.
Recurrent Pattern Detection, RPD and Zero-Hour are trademarks, and Commtouch is a registered trademark, of Commtouch Software Ltd. U.S. Patent No. 6,330,590 is owned by Commtouch.
Company Contact:
Rebecca Steinberg Herson
rebeccah@commtouch.com
US: 650-864-2112
Int'l: +972-9-863-6877
