Reports shows – only 12% of all E-Mail messages were legitimate during the month of November

Postini, the industry’s leading provider of email security and management for the enterprise, today announced that only 12 percent of all email messages processed in November were legitimate, a two percent decrease from last month. Of the 6.9 billion messages processed by Postini, 88 percent were malicious attacks such as spam, phishing, viruses, and directory harvest attacks.

“As evidenced by the increase of email attacks at the connection level this month, spammers are getting smarter about how they approach their targets,” said Andrew Lochart, director of product marketing at Postini. “It’s for this reason Postini offers its users complete email boundary protection that goes well beyond simple content filtering to provide security at the connection level to reduce email intrusion threats early on. Simple content filtering alone is ineffective as a means of stopping spam and viruses.”

Postini also prevented a total of 92 million virus instances from entering corporate networks. Viruses accounted for 1.3 percent of all email, with the bagle virus more than doubling from last month. Postini’s top ten viruses of November were: