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* ECM email security Update - Threat Statistics in India *
* Top 5 Most Prevalent Viruses in India *
* Latest Virus of the Week - W32.Mytob.S@mm
* Email Security Alert - News of the Week.

1. ECM email security Update - Threat Statistics in India *
a) Junk mails increase by 50%. Amounts for 65.73 % of total mails in India.

b) 58.97% of the overall mails originated from Open Relay servers, Open proxies or Zombie machines exploited worldwide.

2. Top 5 Most Prevalent Viruses in India
a) W32/Netsky.P@mm -- 32.68 %

W32/Netsky.P@mm is a mass-mailing worm that uses its own SMTP engine to send itself to the email addresses it finds when scanning the hard drives and mapped drives. The worm also tries to spread through various file-sharing programs by copying itself into various shared folders.The From line of the email is spoofed, and its Subject line and message body of the email vary. The attachment name varies with the .exe, .pif, .scr, or .zip file extension.

b) W32.MyDoom.BG@mm -- 15.60 %

The latest mass mailing worm has its own SMTP engine to replicate itself to the email addresses that it collects from the PC it has infected. The worm then downloads PWSteal.Trojan on the infected system. It sends an email message that contains a link to a website with a copy of itself. This virus is considered low in wild and has medium damage and high distribution capabilities.

c) HTML.Phishing.Bank-1 -- 11.83 %

Is a trojan that steals personal information and spreads through emails.

d) W32.FunLove.4099 -- 6.71 %

W32.FunLove.4099 replicates under Windows 95/98/Me and Windows NT. It infects programs that have .exe, .scr, and .ocx extensions. What is notable about this virus is that it uses a new strategy to attack the Windows NT file security system, and it runs as a service on Windows NT system

e) W32/Netsky.Q@mm -- 5.94 %

Is a mass-mailing worm that consists of two components: a dropper and a mass-mailing component. It uses its own SMTP engine to send itself to the email addresses it finds when scanning the disk drives. The From line of the email is spoofed, and its Subject line and message body vary. The attachment name also varies and has a .exe, .pif, .scr, or .zip file extension.

f) Others -- 27.24 %

3. Emergic Virus of the Week - W32.Mytob.S@mm
W32.Mytob.S@mm is a mass-mailing worm with back door capabilities that uses its own SMTP engine to send email to addresses that it gathers from the compromised computer. The worm also spreads by exploiting the Microsoft Windows Local Security Authority Service Remote Buffer Overflow (as described in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS04-011).

4. Email Security Alert : News of the week

"Spams will cripple Corporate Economy"

As per US based research firm "Ferris" unsolicitated mails is poised to cripple corporate economy and would cost the world US $ 50 Billion in terms of lost productivity and other expenses in terms of bandwidth consumed in transacting the bulk. Since 2003, the Spam volume hitting corporate sector has increased by 5 times with an estimated costs in dealing with spams touching nearly US $ 17 Billion. The> Spam's cost was maily in lost worker time as employees filtered spams, dealt with false positives and asked for corporate help desk for assistance with un wanted mails. However in countries such as India and China, the overall spam level is relatively low and the associated labour-time costs are lower as compared to US labour cost.

Server based filtering was considerably cheaper and effective as compared to Desktop or Gateway based Anti-Spam software. The former typically costs around 750 Indian Rupees per user per year, the latter 2500 Indian Rupees per user per year. Doing nothing cost even more. Manually filtering drove the spam price tag to 5000 Indian Rupees (approx) per user per year.

Even for small companies or organizations where few workers got most of the spam, a hosted Spam filtering service from a third party service provider would probably be more economical and effective.

*Diclaimer:

The statistics in this report are estimated on the basis of the mail traffic arriving on the Netcore's Emergic CleanMail servers with an average of 3 to 4 lakh mails hitting the servers daily. The statistics represent the mail traffic for Corporate Indian Clients and doesn't account for traffic to free email addresses.