Commtouch Weighs in on Industry-wide Phishing Attack Debate and Other Messaging and Web Security News in Quarterly Trend Report

The third quarter of 2009 raised debate in the security industry following published reports that phishing attacks had declined overall. Commtouch^® and its security alliance partners weighed in on this discussion and shared their phishing trend data in the Q3 2009 Internet Threat Trends Report by Commtouch (Nasdaq:CTCH).

Also for the second quarter in a row, there were spikes in email-borne viruses not caught by major anti-virus engines, differentiating the results of these two quarters from the rather consistently low numbers seen during the previous 18 months, according to the Report.

Commtouch’s quarterly trend report is based on the analysis of over two billion email messages and Internet transactions seen daily in the Company’s cloud-based global detection centers.

Other highlights from the Q3 Trend Report include:

• An average of 332,000 zombies were newly activated each day for the purpose of malicious activity.
• Spam levels averaged 83% of all email traffic throughout the quarter, peaking at 97% in July and bottoming out at 71% in August.
• Email-borne malware that bypassed traditional anti-virus engines peaked every 11 to 13 days during the second half of the quarter, dominated by Mal-Bredo A and Mal Behav-340, of which over 10,000 distinct variants were distributed.
• Sites in the "Health & Medicine" and "Sex Education" categories topped the list of Web categories manipulated by phishing schemes.
• "Business" continued to be the Web site category most infected with malware.
• The financial crises and the debate around health care reform in the US has shaped recent spam trends.
• Pharmacy spam returned to the top spot with 68% of all spam messages. Last quarter’s top spam subject, enhancements, fell from 46.2% to 11% of all spam messages during the quarter.
• Brazil continues to produce the most zombies, responsible for 19.7% of global zombie activity.

Comparing phishing data between organizations is problematic because of the varying methods used to gather and compile data. For this reason, a broad, multi-vendor view of Web security trends, such as through the Commtouch Security Alliance, draws the most accurate picture of the Internet threatscape.

“It is not only the absolute number of attacks which is important when examining phishing data, but also the sophistication of such attacks that causes data to vary from company to company. Small, targeted attacks can cause much more financial damage than less sophisticated large scale ones,” said Asaf Greiner, vice president of Web security at Commtouch. “In our examination of spam messages which lure end users to phishing sites, we see that there is not only great fluctuation in the volumes of attacks, but also great differences in the quality of them, which has a direct link to the likelihood of the attack to cause damage.”

Commtouch Recurrent Pattern Detection™ and GlobalView™ technologies identify and block messaging and Web security threats, including increasingly malicious malware and phishing outbreaks. More details, including samples and statistics, are available in the Commtouch Q3 2009 Internet Threats Trend Report, available from Commtouch Labs at: http://www.commtouch.com/download/1548.

NOTE: Reported global spam levels are based on Internet email traffic as measured from unfiltered data streams, not including internal corporate traffic. Therefore global spam levels will differ from the quantities reaching end user inboxes, due to several possible layers of filtering at the ISP level.

About Commtouch

Commtouch® (NASDAQ:CTCH) provides proven messaging and Web security technology to more than 100 security companies and service providers for integration into their solutions. Commtouch’s patented Recurrent Pattern Detection™ (RPD™) and GlobalView™ technologies are founded on a unique cloud-based approach, and work together in a comprehensive feedback loop to protect effectively in all languages and formats. Commtouch technology automatically analyzes billions of Internet transactions in real-time in its global data centers to identify new threats as they are initiated, protecting email infrastructures and enabling safe, compliant browsing. The company’s expertise in building efficient, massive-scale security services has resulted in mitigating Internet threats for thousands of organizations and hundreds of millions of users in 190 countries. Commtouch was founded in 1991, is headquartered in Netanya, Israel, and has a subsidiary in Sunnyvale, Calif.

Stay abreast of the latest messaging and Web threat trends all quarter long at the Commtouch Café: http://blog.commtouch.com. For more information about enhancing security offerings with Commtouch technology, see http://www.commtouch.com or write info@commtouch.com.

Recurrent Pattern Detection, RPD, Zero-Hour and GlobalView are trademarks, and Commtouch is a registered trademark, of Commtouch Software Ltd. U.S. Patent No. 6,330,590 is owned by Commtouch.