Tumbleweed reports 300% increase in DoS attacks

Corporate IT Update, Dec 15, 2005

CORPORATE IT UPDATE-(C)1995-2005 M2 COMMUNICATIONS LTD

A Dark Traffic Report from Tumbleweed Communications Corp (Nasdaq:TMWD), a provider of e-mail security, file transfer security and identity validation solutions, has revealed a 300% increase in Denial of Servicer (DoS) attacks.

The report covers the third quarter of 2005 and includes data on the frequency of network-level threats to e-mail infrastructures, and the impact this has on organisations and is based on a sampling of over 100 million messages.

Tumbleweed said Dark Traffic, which includes e-mail DoS attacks, Directory Harvest Attacks (DHA), malformed SMTP packets and invalid recipient addresses, accounted for 83% of the inbound e-mail network traffic processed by enterprises from July through to September 2005. A proportion of the remaining 17% of 'valid' messages are later identified as unwanted spam by content filters.

Tumbleweed claimed that there has been a 170% increase in DHAs and said that 43% of inbound SMTP traffic is addressed to invalid recipients. It also determined that an employee's e-mail address is used as the network login username for more than 40% of the enterprises surveyed, which puts network security at risk if DHAs are successful.

The report also includes the results of a survey of more than 100 US IT and e-mail administrators which demonstrates there is still a significant gap between the actual and perceived amount of Dark Traffic that organisations receive.

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