FrontBridge Sees Holiday Spam Volumes Surpass 90 per cent

Botnets Raise Level of Holiday Spam to Exponential Levels

13 December, 2004 - FrontBridge Technologies Inc., the leader in enterprise message management and email security, today announced spam volumes topped 93 per cent in November, a record high since FrontBridge started recording business-email spam volumes four years ago. FrontBridge's spam and virus analytics team predicts a grim outlook through the remainder of the holiday season with the spam tide expected to steadily increase until the New Year. Volumes should taper slightly as spammers return to "normal" operations in the early part of 2005.

During the week of US Thanksgiving, FrontBridge filtered more than 704 million spam messages from the email boxes of its 3,500 enterprise customers, with a heavy concentration of email in the days leading up to the U.S. holiday. In the same period last year, FrontBridge blocked 94 million spam messages. This year's unprecedented 704 million spam messages during the week of Thanksgiving marks a whopping 649 per cent year-over-year increase. Much of the spam this holiday season has consisted of phishing emails, scam-oriented email aimed at defrauding users of private information by assuming the identity of legitimate organisations, such as banks, e-commerce sites and government agencies.

"Spammers are stepping up delivery methods to ensure this holiday season is as profitable for them as it is for traditional retailers," said Craig Whitney, Director EMEA, FrontBridge Technologies. "The massive increase in spam this holiday season can definitely be attributed to the Botnet phenomenon, where PC's worldwide are unknowingly transformed into spam-relaying zombies. Businesses should place a spam filtering solution such as FrontBridge at the top of their Christmas wish list to avoid losing more employee productivity to the spam deluge."

In order to combat this enormous problem, FrontBridge's TrueProtect suite of managed services for email security employs several unique spam filtering techniques, including its Real-Time Attack Prevention (RTAP) technology, connection log analysis, proprietary fingerprinting, and adaptive, rules-based scoring. FrontBridge's fully managed service eliminates over 95 per cent of spam before it enters corporate networks, enabling company's to recapture lost productivity, reduce the amount wasted network bandwidth, and save IT costs associated with building and administering an on-premise system.
FrontBridge also offers an unmatched "critical false positive guarantee," assuring less than one in one million legitimate business messages may be mistaken for spam.

FrontBridge was one of the first companies to adopt the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) to authenticate email domains. It has also published SPF records for its own domain to ensure that messages sent via the FrontBridge network are accurately identified as being legitimate.

FrontBridge email security suite includes anti-virus, content filtering, policy enforcement, message archiving, encrypted email and disaster recovery services. All of these capabilities are backed by FrontBridge's industry-leading reliability, having experienced zero downtime on its network since service inception in 2001. As a result, FrontBridge is the only vendor that can guarantee 99.999 per cent up time on top of its 100 per cent historic uptime record.

Register for the FrontBridge Educational Webinar Series
For companies looking to learn more about the latest spam fighting trends, join a FrontBridge webinar titled, "Spam Wars: Preventive Approaches to Avoiding Spam Scams." The session will cover how new strains of spam are wreaking havoc on corporate networks by preying on unsuspecting email users and what measures companies can implement to keep employees safe. Lead spam analyst at Ferris Research, Richi Jennings will provide expert analysis of the latest messaging scams, including phishing emails, botnets, joe jobs and directory harvest attacks. Jesse Villa, technical product manager, FrontBridge Technologies, will discuss how companies can stay safe with its unique combination of protective and preventive approach to message filtering.

The session is on Tuesday, Dec. 14 at 9:00 PDT. For more information, please visit http://www.frontbridge.com/news/webinar.php

About FrontBridge Technologies
FrontBridge Technologies Inc. is the market leader for enterprise message management and security services. Its comprehensive portfolio of managed services include spam filtering, virus protection, policy enforcement, disaster recovery, secure email and message archiving. FrontBridge managed services are delivered across the company's SMART Network(tm) - a proven, reliable, on-demand, globally-distributed network of secure data centers. FrontBridge was the first company to guarantee 99.999-per cent service level agreements (SLA) and the only company with a track record of 100-per cent uptime.

FrontBridge, headquartered in Marina del Rey, Calif., provides message management and security for more than 3,500 enterprises globally. Visit us on the Web at www.FrontBridge.com or call or in the U.K., .