Online Shopping and Spam Floods Before Christmas

Boston, Mass. – December 8, 2003 – Cobion, a content security provider for e-mail and URL blocking has seen an extensive rise in the number of Internet hosts providing online shopping sites. Over a 12-month period, the number of hosts discovered by Cobion’s searching technology connected with online shopping almost doubled: it rose from 221,471 in November 2002 to 401,427 this year.

The company employs 1,000 servers in its Germany data center that operates around the clock, continuously combing the Internet for unwanted, illegal or non-business related websites. Performing content analysis on both text and images, the technology categorizes its findings into 58 categories, such as music, shopping, gambling, dating, sports, drugs, weapons, etc.

Over time the Cobion technology has searched and analyzed some 2.6 billion websites and has compiled these into a “living” database of 20 million active URL entries, the largest in the industry, and which customers can subscribe to via its URL blocking product, the OrangeBox Web.

As more people than ever are planning to do this year’s Christmas shopping on the Internet, Jupiter Research is expecting a 20% increase – $16.8 billion more in comparison to 2002. The market researchers act on the assumption that more than 63.6 million people in the US are going to buy their Christmas presents online. Americans are estimated to spend an average of $265 in 2003 – up from $257 last year.

Online shopping is becoming more and more popular, and spammers, of course, also benefit from the increased interest in people’s handling of their Christmas shopping on the Net. They try to stimulate their interests in surfing while collecting more and more addresses. Both the shopping activities at workplaces and the increasing flood of junk mails before Christmas are killing time and money at numerous companies – resulting in further increases year after year.

According to a Nucleus Research survey, the average employee receives 13.3 spam mails per day. The lost productivity per employee estimated for one year would be 1.4%. Cobion’s spam database can confront this problem – it currentlty holds over 200,000 samples, stored as 128 bit hash value digital fingerprints. With more than ten content filtering methods, the email blocking product OrangeBox Mail keeps employees inboxes clean. It prevents confidential documents from leaving the company while spam is kept from going in at the same time. In addition, users receive updates four times a day from the Cobion database.

Free 30-Day Trial Versions of OrangeBox Web and Orangebox Mail can be downloaded at www.cobion.com. About Cobion

Founded in 1997, Cobion’s mission is to protect organizations from unwanted or non-business related content, including e-mails, spam and file attachments. All unwanted or illegal content is kept outside, while confidential information is kept inside the company. Cobion develops the OrangeBox Web (Web filter), OrangeBox Mail (e-mail and spam filter) and OrangeBox LAN (intranet filter) security products and distributes to customers worldwide to facilitate more productive Internet usage, reduced liability, and intellectual property protection. Cobion is venture-funded with $5.9 million by Wellington Partners Venture Capital GmbH, Munich and Sofinnova Ventures Inc., Paris. With customers such as adidas, Bayer, Daimler-Chrysler, Dow Chemical, IBM, VeriSign and PricewaterhouseCoopers, Cobion’s OrangeBox suite of security products are sold through a worldwide network of channel partners. Cobion is headquartered in Germany and Boston, Mass. with subsidiaries in London, UK and Shanghai, China. Please visit .