No let-up in email threat landscape

Email Security Threat Brief for the month of March 2010 highlights the monthly email trends from Websense Security Labs.

Key stats:

Threats 'in the mail' this month:

• 3.5 billion messages processed by the Hosted Infrastructure (over 112 million per day)
• 83.4% of all email was spam
• 93.7% of spam included an embedded URL
• 1.1 million instances of 85 unique zero-day threats stopped by ThreatSeeker before AV (antivirus)
• 0.4% of spam emails were phishing attacks

How Websense is addressing these threats:

• 99.5% spam detection rate. Websense Hosted Email Security provides 99% spam detection Service Level Agreement.
• Average false positive rate of 1 in 327,083
• 26% average daily threats protected using ThreatSeeker intelligence before AV signatures were available

What this means:

• Not surprisingly, the threat landscape is dangerous and growing more sophisticated.