One Year On, EU spam Legislation Still Has No Impact

December 22, 2004 – CipherTrust, the leader in messaging security, today announced its concern over the lack of success of the Privacy and Electronics Communication Directive launched on December 11, 2003.

Radicati Group estimates that spam will account for 46 percent of emails in 2004, increasing to 71 percent by 2008 and will cost European companies EUR85bn over the next four years. In conjunction, research from CipherTrust identified nearly 86 percent of all spam sent between May and August 2004 originated in the United States. The results demonstrate the need for government and organisations to take a more definitive role in the combination of legislation, user education and technology to combat the global spam invasion.

Paul Judge, CTO at CipherTrust said: “The legislation brought in by the EU prohibits companies to send unsolicited emails to addresses they do not have a business relationship with. When this legislation came into effect it was criticised as only protecting consumers. A year on this criticism is verified as companies battle with the rising cost of spam on the bottom line, employee productivity and the consumption of IT resources.”

CipherTrust’s analysis of real-world email messages collected from companies worldwide using IronMail, its award-winning messaging security appliance, found definitive evidence that spammers overwhelmingly utilise computers based in the U.S. to send spam. Judge continued: “This alone shows that the legislation adopted in the EU has no affect on spam that comes from outside the continent. Combine this with the large amount of spam sent from hijacked computers and independent legislation alone cannot combat the global issue of spam.

Spam is much more than a nuisance – it costs corporations in both money and human resources. For this reason we urge that education and technology are combined with legislation to combat this problem on a global scale. It is illegal to steal cars but they still have locks and alarms.”

About CipherTrust, Inc.
CipherTrust, Inc. is the leader in messaging security. Recognised as the market leader by IDC, the Company’s award-winning IronMail appliance protects the messaging systems of more enterprise e-mail users than any other solution, including more than 30 percent of the Fortune 100. CipherTrust pioneered messaging security by uniquely combining the five critical e-mail security components of spam and fraud prevention, virus and worm protection, policy and content compliance, e-mail privacy, and intrusion prevention into a single easy to deploy and manage platform. The Company is backed by top tier investors including Battery Ventures and Greylock Partners. For more information about CipherTrust, please visit www.ciphertrust.com .