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Back-to-School Means Back-to-Spam
Thousands of College PCs Turned Into Zombies According to St. Bernard's Threat Center
| Source: St. Bernard
SAN DIEGO, CA--(Marketwire - November 12, 2007) - St.
Bernard Software, Inc. (OTCBB : SBSW ), a global provider of security
appliances and on-demand solutions, including secure content management and
archiving, today announced its October Threat Center results, highlighting
a 33% increase in spam and virus activity over September.
The statistics validate the company's recent forecast of an increase in
malicious online activity due to the beginning of a new school year. St.
Bernard researchers also observed a continued growth in visits to
social-networking and file-sharing sites, two favorite online destinations
for students. With unmanaged Web surfing and download policies, 'virgin'
student PCs at colleges were compromised and turned into zombies that send
spam, a pattern that repeats itself every year.
During October, both the average number of messages and the amount of spam
St. Bernard's customers received per day rose by 33% over September. On
average, the company blocked 89% of inbound messages as junk. Phishing
scams were on the rise as well, with the iGuard™ team identifying a
ten-fold increase in the number of such Web sites during the month of
October. This indicates most of the spam was phishing related, intended to
lure victims to new malicious Web sites.
"As predicted, we saw a significant spike in spam in October," said Andrew
Lochart, vice president of marketing and product management at St. Bernard.
"College freshmen bring new PCs to school with them. Because of lax network
management at educational institutions and unsafe browsing by students, the
computers are quickly recruited into botnets and used to pump out spam,
viruses and phishing attacks. This year's back-to-school season was no
different from past years, unfortunately."
St. Bernard provides hybrid security offerings, combining best-of-breed
appliance and hosted solutions to protect corporate networks from online
threats in HTTP, instant messages (IM) and P2P traffic, including spyware,
malware and phishing. The products also block viruses and spam, archive
email and IM and prevent Internet abuse by managing Web access.
For more information on how St. Bernard meets the secure content management
and messaging security needs of businesses, please visit www.stbernard.com.
About St. Bernard
St. Bernard Software, Inc. (OTCBB : SBSW ) is a global provider of security
appliances and hosted solutions, including secure content management and
archiving. The company's award-winning products deliver innovative security
solutions that offer the best combination of ease-of-use, performance and
value.
Established in 1995 with headquarters in San Diego, CA and international
offices in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, St. Bernard sells and
supports its products directly and through solution partners worldwide. For
more information, please visit www.stbernard.com.
©2007 St. Bernard Software, Inc. All rights reserved. The St. Bernard
Software logo, LivePrism, iPrism, and iGuard are trademarks of St. Bernard
Software, Inc. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are hereby
acknowledged.
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