Corporate instant messaging on the rise
May 05, 2006
Postini filtered 7.6 million instant messaging (IM)conversations in April, an increase of more than 15% from March's 6.5 million, underscoring the continued growth of corporate IM.
"The continued increase in IM messages by 5.5 million over the past two months is a clear indication that IM is becoming a main-stream business communications tool for employees," said Andrew Lochart, senior director of marketing for Postini.
Compared to email viruses which are roughly 2-3 percent of all email, IM malicious content is relatively low at .1 percent of all IM traffic.
Postini noted that the Mytob virus had a variant that was traversing all IM and enterprise clients. Trojans that were blocked included IMFlood and JahuKit, and worms included Appflet, YahooSpy, Mpass, and MSNFake.
Postini also processed over 22 billion email messages during April and found that spam accounted for 18.5 billion messages, a one percent decrease compared to March, bringing the total amount of unwanted email to 84% for the month.
The number of quarantined viruses remained the same as March, with Postini stopping a total of 28 million viruses. The top five viruses for April were:
Virus Name Quantity Blocked
MyTob@MM 9,734,948
Netsky 4,948,258
Mytob 4,764,122
Swen 2,157,894
Lovgate 1,774,849
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