Spam Volumes Dip Following Onslaught of September Hurricanes

October 8, 2004 – FrontBridge Technologies Inc., the leader in enterprise message management and email security, today announced that spam volumes reached a record peak of 91 per cent on September 12 and hit a monthly average of 85 per cent, an increase of three per cent from August. The high monthly average occurred despite a significant decline in spam messages during the days following three separate hurricanes in the month of September.

The data was compiled by a specialised spam analyst team from data collected on the FrontBridge network over the last month. On a daily basis, FrontBridge’s team of analysts filter and analyse characteristics for more than 100 million messages from more than 2,500 enterprise customers.

For each of the three tropical storms, Hurricane Frances, Ivan and Jeanne, the day of the hurricane and the day following showed the biggest declines in spam. After Hurricane Frances, spam volumes fell from 89 per cent to below 82 per cent. Following Hurricane Ivan, spam fell from the record peak for the month of 91 per cent to below 84 per cent. As Hurricane Jeanne departed, the amount of spam messages dipped six per cent to 83 per cent.

“Spammers are in the volume business — the more spam they send, the more money they can make,” said Dan Nadir, vice president of product management at FrontBridge. “While the series of hurricanes that hit Florida in September impacted spam volumes on a short-term basis, spammers more than made up for lost time during the rest of the month and still managed to produce an ‘up’ month overall.”

FrontBridge’s spam and virus analyst team determines spam volume based on spam messages filtered over the volume of inbound messages that are processed by the FrontBridge spam solution. FrontBridge’s managed service for spam filtering and virus protection, scans email for spam and viruses before messages reach the corporate network reducing unwanted emails and ensuring that virus-infected email and malicious code never touch the network.

About FrontBridge Technologies
FrontBridge Technologies Inc. is the market leader for enterprise message management and security services. Its comprehensive portfolio of managed services include spam filtering, virus protection, policy enforcement, disaster recovery, secure email and message archiving. FrontBridge managed services are delivered across the company’s SMART network – a proven, reliable, on-demand, globally-distributed network of secure data centres. FrontBridge was the first company to guarantee 99.999-per cent service level agreements (SLA) and the only company with a track record of 100-per cent uptime.

Now in its fifth year of operation, FrontBridge, headquartered in Marina del Rey, Calif., provides message management and security for more than 2,200 enterprises globally. Visit us on the Web at www.FrontBridge.com or call 877.301.8232 or in the UK, +44 20 7872.5417

SMART Network and TrueProtect are trademarks of FrontBridge Technologies.