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St. Bernard: Spam Uptick Predicted After Summer
St. Bernard tracks summer slowdown in spam and virus activity warns of increase in viruses and zombies from student PCs
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SAN DIEGO -- 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 Threat Center researchers tracked a decrease in the volume of email during Summer 2007. However, with school in full swing and employees returning from vacation, the company predicts an increase in spam and viruses and social networking site visits in coming months.
The average number of messages St. Bernard's customers receive per day dropped by nearly 10% from July to September. In addition, viruses declined from approximately 4% of all customer email in July to 1.8% in September. On average, the company blocked 90% of inbound messages as junk. This is consistent with a study Nucleus Research conducted earlier this year, which estimates at least 90% of email reaching corporate servers is spam. Furthermore, the firm approximates the "spam epidemic" costs US businesses $712 per employee each year in lost worker productivity.1
As the new school year is ramping up, St. Bernard is seeing a traffic increase to social networking sites. During the month of September, its Threat Center researchers increased the number of categorized "social network" sites in its iGuard(tm) database by 9%. This is double the typical rate of additions. As students increasingly visit them to interact with classmates, St. Bernard expects this trend to further escalate next month.
"With students and employees returning from vacation, we expect a spike in online activity, including spam and virus volume and visits to inappropriate Web sites," said Andrew Lochart, vice president of marketing and product management at St. Bernard. "Hundreds of thousands of new student PCs will be put on poorly protected school and university networks, creating new zombies and more spam from risky web surfing and downloading. Schools and businesses that don't filter web access are leaving their networks wide open."
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