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CipherTrust Announces ZombieMeter
SecurityProNews
Staff Writer
2005-05-26
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CipherTrust today announced the ZombieMeter, a new online resource that tracks worldwide zombie activity in real-time.
The ZombieMeter is driven by the Company's ongoing research to identify the latest messaging security threats and experience protecting the messaging systems of more than 1,500 enterprise customers worldwide.
Throughout the month of May, CipherTrust researchers found an average of 172,009 new zombies identified each day. Approximately 20 percent of the new zombies originated in the United States and 15 percent originated in China, representing a slight shift from research conducted during late March and early April which identified that approximately 20 percent of the 157,000 new zombies at that time originated in China. The origin of the zombie machines may change on a daily basis as machines can be infected anywhere in the world.
CipherTrust has found that over the past three months, the largest percent of zombie originations have altered between China and the United States. In addition, during the first three weeks of May, approximately 26 percent of daily new zombies originated in the European Union, including six percent, five percent and three percent of new zombies originated in Germany, France and the United Kingdom, respectively.
"Over the past year, CipherTrust researchers have continued to analyze the information tracked from our IronMail appliances to identify threats such as zombie activity, virus patterns and phishing attacks, to name a few," said Dr. Paul Judge, CipherTrust chief technology officer. "With more than 1,500 enterprise customers, CipherTrust has a very broad, unique view of the Internet and potential threats as they happen across the globe. The launch of our ZombieMeter furthers our commitment to making this information available to the e-mail community. By monitoring global messaging activity and identifying behavioral patterns, we can continue to provide predictive protection against threats before they emerge."
Through data received from the Company's global network of IronMail appliances, which protect more than 10 million enterprise e-mail inboxes, CipherTrust's ZombieMeter tracks the number of new, completely unique zombies per hour, every hour. Visitors can view real-time updates regarding new zombie activity across the world, including the origination of messages and the number of machines affected by zombie activity. A zombie is a machine--typically connected to a broadband connection and without any type of firewall or anti-virus protection--that has been maliciously infected by a worm or virus without the owners' knowledge and is used to launch Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and send spam and phishing e-mails.
CipherTrust's ongoing research lends significant insight to the nature of messaging security threats and drives changes to the Company's award-winning messaging security appliance, IronMail. One of the key components of IronMail which helps to drive this research is TrustedSource, the Company's e-mail reputation system. TrustedSource is based on real-time observation of enterprise e-mail, leveraging CipherTrust's network of enterprise e-mail customers. It responds immediately to changes in a sender's behavior to shut down zombie attacks. In addition, TrustedSource is a key contributor and information source for CipherTrust Threat Response Updates (TRU), which are designed to maximize effectiveness and protection for IronMail customers by determining and providing optimal configuration settings for IronMail units in the field.
About the Author:
SecurityProNews is a daily online and email publication focusing on internet security issues.
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