Spam Tsunami as Spammers Target Asian Market, While Netsky Tops Clearswift's Virus Index.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. -- In what is likely to be the latest tactic deployed to fool spam filters, Clearswift's latest analysis of spam has identified a significant upsurge in spam based on double byte characters -- i.e., spam written in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

While spam written in these languages is unlikely to have a significant impact in the United Kingdom, where only a small minority of people would understand the subject of the e-mails, the recent rise in this kind of spam suggests spammers may be seeing a high response rate in the Asian territories. This could indicate that more unsolicited mail is actually emanating from these countries, with the spammers specifically targeting the Far Eastern countries with localized offers.

Double byte character spam is an effective way of bypassing the majority of spam filters as they are not yet sophisticated enough to analyze the content of spam based written in double byte characters. As a result, and the fact that anti-spam vendors will take time to get up to speed with this new threat, it is likely that this "spam tsunami" will continue to grow stronger.

"We started seeing this new breed of spam back in June but in the last couple of days of August it was suddenly everywhere," commented Alyn Hockey, director of research at Clearswift. "From almost nothing, these Oriental mails have risen to account for 5% of all spam within the space of a month."

Clearswift's spam index reveals the continued dominance of financial and pharmaceutical spam. See spam chart for details.

According to Clearswift's virus index, August was dominated by the Netsky family of mass-mailing viruses despite the arrest of its suspected teenage author, Sven Jaschan, earlier this year. Although Netsky's original objective was to disable the Bagle/MyDoom viruses, which were being used to hijack zombie PCs for denial of service (DDoS) attacks, Jaschan faces up to five years in jail following charges of computer sabotage, data manipulation and disruption of public systems. It's a pity he didn't realize that Clearswift's MAILsweeper for SMTP e-mail filtering solution pro-actively detects new Bagle worms by the tell-tale signature held within the mail header. See accompanying virus chart for details.

The spam categorization statistics were extracted from the millions of spam e-mails harvested by Clearswift's seed accounts on a weekly basis. They are collated and analyzed using Clearswift's spamActive service, which is an integral component of the multi-layered anti-spam protection offered by MAILsweeper(TM) Business Suite II. Updated eight times daily, spamActive routinely extracts spam terms, sender domains, URLs and subject lines, which can be automatically downloaded to update customers' e-mail policies. The virus statistics are generated using raw data from Clearswift's e-Sweeper(TM), a managed e-mail content security solution for service providers.

About Clearswift

Clearswift secures content and protects against digital attacks by enforcing security policies that increase productivity, reduce IT costs and create a safer business environment. Its world leading business is founded on providing Total Content Security for e-mail and Web.

The Internet is the greatest business tool ever invented, but with it comes a harrowing collection of threats. Protecting against the circulation of inappropriate images and text, spam, breaches of confidentiality, and viruses is now mission critical.

Clearswift enables organizations to protect themselves against digital attacks, meet legal and regulatory requirements, implement productivity-saving policies and manage intellectual property passing through their network.

Clearswift's MAILsweeper(TM) Business Suite II combines comprehensive e-mail content security, learning anti-spam software and remote management functionality, which allows multiple e-mail administrators to investigate quarantined e-mails remotely via a Web-based interface. Its Personal Message Manager feature enables desktop spam management, thus eliminating false positives, and the report centre provides powerful reporting capabilities for monitoring spam activity. This solution enables organizations to protect themselves from fraudulent spam, as well as other e-mail threats such viruses, spyware, pornography, lost productivity, damage to reputation, loss of confidential information and network congestion.

Clearswift's portfolio includes MIMEsweeper(TM), the world's most advanced content security solutions, as well as a range of specialized security solutions for the most security conscious environments.

Clearswift has 15,000 customers and over 20 million end users worldwide. It has offices in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Japan and Australia.

About e-Sweeper(TM)

e-Sweeper is a managed e-mail content security solution for service providers. Experienced professionals handle protection from content threats at the e-mail gateway, freeing the organization from the cost of implementing the hardware, software and administration expertise necessary to effectively stop the myriad of content security threats.

Clearswift, MAILsweeper, MIMEsweeper, spamActive and ENTERPRISEsuite are trademarks or registered trademarks, in the United States, United Kingdom and certain other countries, of Clearswift Limited. Additional company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of the individual companies and are respectfully acknowledged.