Mar 1, 2005 : Directory Harvest Attacks Rising

📅 March 1, 2005 - Email security and management provider Postini announced on Tuesday that directory harvest attacks by spammers against corporate email soared high at record levels in February while unwanted email remained virtually unchanged at 88 percent of total email. Postini's findings are calculated by the 14.8 billion messages it processed in February.

"February was the worst month ever for DHAs," says Andrew Lochart, director of product marketing for Postini. "In fact, the five worst days ever recorded by Postini were in February. The average Postini customer was attacked 224 times per day, with each attack comprising 166 invalid message delivery attempts."
The percentage of email infected with a virus dropped in February from 0.9 percent to 0.7 percent, says Postini. The top ten viruses, in order, were netsky, mime, bagle, zafi, sober, mydoom, Bankfraud, phish-bankfraud, lovgate, new malware-e.