MailFrontier Announces Anti-Fraud Products And Strategic Partnerships With Cyveillance And Sygate Technologies To Protect Enterprise And Individual Users From Online Identity Theft

Identity Theft Is The Fastest Growing Crime In The U.S. According To The Federal Trade Commission (FTC); Recent MailFrontier Study Shows 80 Million Fraudulent Emails Sent In September 2003

PALO ALTO, CA – October 20, 2003 – MailFrontier, a leading messaging security company, today announced a company initiative aimed at protecting corporate and at-home email users from a new category of email threats: email fraud and online identify theft. This initiative includes two software products with fraud-filtering capabilities, two strategic partnerships and an educational program. To fight against the wave of dangerous emails scams, MailFrontier now offers a public beta version of the award-winning desktop product, MailFrontier Matador, and will be releasing an enterprise anti-fraud module for MailFrontier Anti-Spam Gateway early next year.

MailFrontier also announced strategic partnerships with Cyveillance, a leading provider of eBusiness Intelligence solutions and Sygate Technologies, the leader in enterprise endpoint security. Online identity theft represents a hybrid threat using spam techniques often combined with web-based brand fraud. MailFrontier’s expertise in the email security field combined with real-time intelligence from Cyveillance on brand spoofing allows both companies to attack the problem of online identity theft as it evolves and as fraud techniques become more sophisticated over time. MailFrontier’s partnership with Sygate further protects enterprise and individual users by ensuring MailFrontier anti-fraud software is always in place, operational, correctly configured and up to date.

“Cyveillance and MailFrontier are now jointly committed in providing solutions that help protect individuals and corporations from email fraud and identity theft through the spoofing of websites,” said Panos Anastassiadis, CEO of Cyveillance. “We are confident that together we can broaden awareness of the cost and impact of online fraud and ultimately mitigate this risk for businesses, employees and individual victims of this rapidly growing crime.”

“Sygate policy enforcement expertise and MailFrontier messaging technology will ensure employees and individuals are always protected by ensuring corporate networks have compliant anti-fraud software,” said Babak Salimi, Director of Product Strategy at Sygate. “We look forward to eliminating online fraud risk through this partnership.”

MailFrontier also developed an educational program to help corporate and individual email users better understand how scam artists steal confidential information online. Extensive information on fraudulent emails and the problem of identity theft will be available on MailFrontier’s website: www.mailfrontier.com. The company will continue to update the website with information on recent scams, examples of the spoofed emails, and independent research on the scope of the problem. In addition, MailFrontier is participating in the Coalition on Online Identity Theft to educate the public on this increasing threat and promote a combination of technology, education, and government involvement as an effective solution.

“Online identity theft has reached epidemic proportions and is a serious problem facing businesses and consumers,” said Pavni Diwanji, CEO, MailFrontier. “Highly sophisticated scam artists are creating legitimate-looking emails and websites to capture credit card numbers, social security numbers, bank account numbers, PINs, and passwords which they use to steal from unsuspecting individuals. Spamming has reached new and dangerous levels, and businesses and consumers need tools to protect themselves.”

Enterprise Impact
In addition to the potential liability issues email fraud poses for businesses, the productivity drain on businesses whose employees are victims of online identity theft is staggering. The 2002 FBI Internet Fraud Report shows 70% of Internet fraud victims are between the ages of 20 and 50 – in their working prime. According to a September 2003 study conducted by the Identity Theft Resource Center, it takes approximately 600 hours for an individual to recover from identity theft, or about a third of the working hours in a year.

Consumer Impact
Identity theft costs consumers an average of $1,400 per fraud as well as up to $16,000 in lost earnings according to a September 2003 Identity Theft Resource Center report. And the incidence of consumer fraud is growing fast: the Internet Fraud Complaint Center reports that Internet fraud cases referred to law enforcement tripled from 2001 to 2003.

The FTC estimates that identity theft costs businesses $48 billion and consumers $5 billion each year. With the advent of the Internet and email, scam artists now have the potential to reach millions of people with the click of a button. The FBI reports that the category of Internet Fraud accounted for $54 million in losses in 2002, up from only $17 million in 2001.

“Email has become one of the most dominant vectors for online fraud,” said Arabella Hallawell, analyst, Gartner. “Enterprises increasingly need to take additional steps to protect their brands and their employees.”

Email Scams Reach Millions of People At Once
Increasingly over the past 6 months, scam artists have created a series of fraudulent emails “spoofing” industry-leading companies such as eBay, PayPal, and Citibank, and have distributed fraudulent emails to millions of individuals through the use of spamming techniques. In a recent scam, an email appearing to be from Citibank requested that Citibank customers visit the company’s website to ensure that personal accounts would not be suspended. Citibank customers were then secretly redirected to a fraudulent spoof website where they were asked to submit personal and confidential information including account numbers and passwords. In a study conducted by MailFrontier Research in September 2003, over 40 percent of users who received the Citibank email scam were tricked into thinking it was legitimate.

While fraud and physical identity theft have historically been conducted one-by-one via ‘dumpster-diving’ and rifling through mailboxes, email is rapidly becoming the preferred method for fraudsters due to the simplicity of anonymously defrauding millions of users in a single try.

Howard A. Schmidt, Former White House Cyber Security advisor, during one of the town hall meetings he held last year was quoted as saying “Consumer and business email users are being plagued by the increasing threat of fraudulent email scams that lead to identity theft, not only creating an environment where the trust of the internet is at risk but becomes a potential for organized crime and terrorist could steal identities. Using a combination of education and technology is one of the best ways to attack this dangerous problem.”

Product Availability
Leveraging patent-pending email fraud-detection technology, a global reporting network of users, and web-analysis information from Cyveillance, MailFrontier solutions protect business and individual users from fraudulent email and spam.

MailFrontier Matador 3.5 with Anti-Fraud Protection Now Available
The desktop software product is now available in public beta and can be downloaded from the MailFrontier website (www.mailfontier.com). MailFrontier Matador 3.5 anti-fraud capabilities include:

Automatic Detection and Categorization of Fraudulent Emails: Fraudulent emails are directed to a separate folder in Outlook or Outlook Express and kept entirely out of the user’s inbox;

Automatic Fraud Alerts: MailFrontier will notify users when new types of fraudulent emails begin circulating and provide links to information on what to look for;

Easy Reporting of Scams: With the click of a button users can fight against email scams by reporting potentially fraudulent emails

MailFrontier Anti-Spam Gateway
An add-on anti-fraud module will be available for all MailFrontier Anti-Spam Gateway users in early 2004.

About MailFrontier
MailFrontier is at the forefront of providing next-generation messaging security products that make email communication more productive and secure in the work place. High volumes of unwanted and dangerous email are crippling enterprise productivity today. MailFrontier offers innovative products to eliminate spam and fraudulent email, including MailFrontier Anti-Spam Gateway(tm) and MailFrontier Matador(tm), utilizing the latest in junk mail blocking technologies, suitable for enterprises and individual users.

MailFrontier software products protect users’ mailboxes proactively, automatically learning about people and topics that are important to them and devising a set of dynamic, personalized preferences. Leveraging a combination of dynamic whitelists, wide-ranging blacklists, intelligent content filters, a global reporting network, and a groundbreaking sender verification process, MailFrontier is uniquely positioned to guard mailboxes from Spam and fraud.