29 March 2007
The Security Solutions division at Internet Solutions (IS), a leading converged communications services provider, recently performed a study in three areas of their security environment to see how they faired. The results speak for themselves and go a long way to explaining why security solutions from IS are a hit with their customers.
The areas covered were: anti-virus, anti-spam and content filtering. The study was based over a 30 day period consisting of average number of attacks per day for the individual solutions. The results show that South African organisations are on a par with the international market, further strengthening the case that SA is evolving into a first world market.
“While this sounds exciting it also comes with a warning note,” says Brett Salovy, manager Security Solutions at IS. “With this growth comes the inherent risk of being top on the list of hackers, spammers and would-be vandals who prey daily on South African organisations. The global nature of our growing markets means that our customers constantly demand better ways of communicating with overseas vendors, consumers, customers and branches. This in turn creates additional points of vulnerability on their networks.”
So, what are the increased threats to our systems? Salovy says top of the list is the all-too-familiar virus, followed closely by spam. IS is plugged into global early warning systems that alert them to the latest threats. With a 24x7 support staff, IS technicians can often filter the threats before they reach their customers organisation.
So how does IS fare overall? What level of threat are we really experiencing?
Viruses:
- IS IDC (Internet Data Centre) – 23,787 SMTP e-mail viruses stopped
- IS IDC – 1.75million HTTP Internet viruses stopped
Spam:
- IS anti-spam platform – 87 million INBOUND mails processed of which 30 million were spam mails stopped by the IS Anti-spam solution
- IS anti-spam platform – 48 million OUTBOUND mails processed of which 28.8 million were spam mails stopped by the IS Anti-spam solution
The above averages out at a ratio of 35% spam and 65% legitimate mail for all incoming mail.
Content Filtering:
- IS Shared Mail Filter platform – 210 million mails processed vs 84 million mails blocked by 1 rule (can assume they are non-business related)
NOTE: Above stats are averages based over 30 day period.
Above stats are based on clients utilizing IS Security solutions.
Based on the above statistics we can therefore assume the following: (also supported by many vendors).
▪ Network attacks have evolved somewhat from the old Happy New Year Trojan (Virus), these days malicious attackers are using more elusive ways of getting to the users.
▪ Spam is the most popular form of abuse, with Spyware and Malware on the increase!
“On average, for every 1million SMTP and HTTP protocols scanned in our environment 30% (300 000) of those are abuse on a client’s network. This equates to a large bandwidth saving/cost for South African organisations,” says Salovy.
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