Marshal Traces a Huge Surge in Sexual Enhancement Spam in 2007

Market Wire, February, 2008

Secure email and Internet gateway security provider Marshal has today released the latest TRACE report. It shows that a spam botnet promoting a particular brand of male enhancement pills accounted for one-third of the total spam volume at the end of 2007. This happened at a time when spam volume was increasing; overall spam volume grew by more than 50% in the second half of last year.

The full report can be downloaded from the TRACE website.

The health spam category, promoting pharmaceuticals such as weight loss pills and performance enhancing drugs, was the dominant spam category in 2007, comprising nearly 70 percent of all spam during the year. The latest report, compiled by Marshal's Threat Research and Content Engineering (TRACE) team, reviews the major developments in spam, malware and phishing in 2007 and reveals the TRACE team's predictions for threat developments in 2008.

"Despite the increased efforts of law enforcement agencies to crack down on spammers and their botnets, spam grew even worse in 2007," commented Bradley Anstis, Vice President of Products for Marshal. "Sex sells and the financial motives of the cybercriminal underworld that sustains spam appear to remain strong. The cost of acquiring the tools and services needed to send spam is reducing and whenever a spam gang is caught, there are others ready to jump in and take over. For these reasons, we are not optimistic that spam is going to recede in 2008."

Marshal's TRACE team monitors and responds to a wide range of Internet security threats and is responsible for the anti-malware defense and updates for Marshal's suite of content security solutions.

About Marshal

Marshal is a global leader in Content Security across multiple protocols, enabling organizations to secure their IT environment, protect against threats and comply with corporate governance needs. Marshal provides customers with a complete portfolio of policy-driven Email and Internet solutions that integrate content filtering, compliance, secure messaging and archiving. Forty percent of the Global Fortune 500 companies use Marshal security solutions to secure their corporate messaging networks and web against internal abuse and external threats such as viruses, spam and malicious code. More than seven million users in 18,000 companies worldwide use Marshal solutions to protect their networks, employees, business assets and corporate reputation and to comply with corporate governance legislation requirements.

Marshal is headquartered in Atlanta (USA) and London (UK) with further offices in Paris (France), Munich (Germany), Johannesburg (South Africa), Houston (USA), Sydney (Australia) and Auckland (New Zealand). More information is available at www.marshal.com .

About TRACE

TRACE (Threat Research and Content Engineering) is a specialized team of Marshal security experts who monitor and respond to Internet security threats. The TRACE Team is tasked with analyzing the performance of Marshal solutions against Internet-borne threats. TRACE focus on a wide range of threats including spam, phishing, viruses and spyware.

The TRACE Team also engineers Marshal's response to threats, including maintaining security updates and detection technologies. TRACE is responsible for testing and issuing SpamCensor and Zero Day updates.

The TRACE Center is a sample of the data-gathering and technical analysis methods that Marshal employs. We will be adding additional statistics and new threat monitors over time so please check back regularly for news, information and new content.

Media Contact: Kerri Moran Carabiner Communications (770) 452-6424 kmoran@carabinerpr.com