Darkmail Traffic Risen Fourfold In 12 Months Says Email Systems

Published 1st August 2005

Bandwidth-clogging, Speculatively Targeted Spam Increases Dramatically...

Email management specialist Email Systems has noted a massive 400% rise in ‘Darkmail’ – speculatively targeted, unsolicited mail which is never retrieved or received by a user – over the last twelve months since August 2004.

Although it is a relatively new phenomenon, Darkmail has risen in prominence recently with a significant increase in the frequency of email attacks that target a specific domain, such as distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) and directory harvest (DHA) attacks for example, as many of the mails sent are never recieved yet have the potential to sap a huge percentage of network bandwidth.

Typically, a Directory Harvest attack will target a specific domain with emails to many millions of combinations of email address at that domain, such as: adamsmith@domain.com; adam.smith@domain.com, adam_smith@domain.com, smitha@domain.com etc. Often the domain owner is targeted either for malicious reasons specific to that organisation, or because the business type of the domain owner is incorrectly identified by the attacker.

One Email Systems client in the manufacturing sector with fewer than 10 employees was recently targeted with more than ten million emails in a single day, each of which were sent to different email addresses at that domain. The most likely explanation for this Directory Harvest attack was that attacker incorrectly believed the target domain to belong to an ISP.

Neil Hammerton, CEO of Email Systems commented:
“Our statistics show that over the last twelve months, spam attackers are becoming increasingly speculative in their approach to reaching an actual user, with the overall volume of unsolicited mails having increased significantly and, more worryingly, the amount that’s mis-targeted having increased by a different order of magnitude altogether. Unfortunately this is resulting in a great deal more unnecessary email traffic which has the potential to severely affect unprotected corporate networks.”

Email Systems has recently launched a third version of it’s suite of services, including Anti-DoS, a new service which will monitor for distributed denial of service (DoS or DDos) & DHA (Directory Harvest) attacks on corporate networks. Whereas classic Denial of Service attacks are relatively easy to safeguard against through identifying and blocking a single IP address via a firewall, DDoS utilises multiple IP addresses to attack a single network or server with a bombardment of email. Anti-DoS monitors for DDoS activity and using reputation based algorithms and data gathered from the Email systems’ network, effectively cuts off the route to the client network without any reduction in bandwidth capacity or levels of service.

The latest version of the management suite also includes Zero Hour Virus Filtering and Spam Outbreak Detection, a completely Redesigned User Interface and a new Reporting Suite providing clients greater flexibility to extract accurate reports in a wide range of formats - including numerous graphical options. v3 also includes TLS (Transport Layer Security) Encryption, allowing all email traffic to be fully encrypted when sent between Email Systems’ clients and their partners and a new Proactive Security Monitor to deliver updates on additional security information, providing peace of mind for the corporate CTO or IT Manager.

Email Systems manages and monitors the flow of spam and virus infected email messages on behalf of millions of corporate, public sector and domestic users across the UK.






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