FrontBridge Technologies, a provider of secure managed messaging
services, has warned business e-mail users of recent anomalies on
its network that point to a flood of spam and viruses aimed at
corporate desktops.
By the end of April 2005, spam volumes on the global
FrontBridge network reached record highs with peak levels reaching
94%. Viruses also rose sharply driven by a new strain of the SOBER
Worm. FrontBridge regards itself as one of the world’s largest
global email handlers, processing more than 5 billion business
email messages a month for more than 3,700 companies.
On the network, spam email averaged 84.6% of total inbound
e-mail in April with a daily high of 94% on April 10 and message
volume also sharply rose to a peak total of 237 million messages on
April 22. FrontBridge attributes the rise in spam volume to large
increases in Russian language and stock offer spam and say that for
companies not protected by perimeter-based managed services, a
single exponential increase in spam email could potentially crash
an e-mail system.
Comments Charles McColgan, chief technology officer for
FrontBridge Technologies: “We’re seeing new types of erratic
behaviour that’s leading us to believe that the profile of spam is
changing. Our research is starting to show new types of message
strains that very frequently change their content, limiting the
effectiveness of more primitive filters. Our advanced content and
context analysis techniques have stopped the bulk of these new
types of threats.”