Small businesses under attack as phishers seek new opportunities, warns Cloudmark Networks protected by Cloudmark instantly protected from latest attack
San Francisco, CA, September 26, 2006—Cloudmark, the proven leader in real-time messaging security, announced today that it is beginning to see phishing attacks directed at small businesses. In a new attack launched last week, appearing as a letter from "Bank of America Small Business Security Management Staff," recipients are urged to confirm their account information in order to be protected from "increased online fraud activity; unauthorized account access; illegal funds withdrawal and also to simplify some processes."
According to Cloudmark's research team, the emails first began to appear in the Cloudmark Global Threat Network around mid-day on Wednesday, September 20th, and were blocked within 90 seconds across all Cloudmark installations around the globe. Cloudmark's researchers noted the threat was likely to have been launched by a long-term spammer as the message matched a fingerprint that was first recorded in 2004.
Managed email is gaining in popularity for small businesses that have precious little time to devote to administrative issues, and Cloudmark is one of the few services that can provide phishing-specific support via its service provider customers, protecting even the smallest of businesses.
Jamie de Guerre, Vice President of Technology Services at Cloudmark, said, "Phishers are always trying to find new ways to reach new targets and this direct attack on the small business community is the latest. Fortunately, this phishing attempt was stopped for small businesses under the protection of Cloudmark's Global Threat Network, whether they use managed services offered by a service provider whose network is protected by Cloudmark or host Cloudmark protection directly on their Microsoft Exchange servers."
Cloudmark Authority enables service providers to offer carrier-class protection to their managed services customers. Fast becoming the solution of choice for service providers worldwide, Cloudmark's solutions offer unparalleled effectiveness in fighting all forms of spam, phishing, and virus attacks. Already in 50 top service provider networks around the world, Cloudmark continually innovates its technology to increase customer satisfaction, prevent impending threats to network infrastructure, and lower the costs associated with rising messaging abuse.
How it Works
The Cloudmark system uses sophisticated fingerprinting algorithms to flag problematical messages, combined with a live global threat reporting network comprised of millions of users, balanced by a trust evaluation system. Real-time, trusted corroboration provides accurate and "unspoofable" data, and the collection, analysis, and update cycle is fully automated to ensure the fastest possible response time. Corroborated fingerprints that identify spam, phishing and virus attacks are updated instantaneously and distributed to the worldwide network every 60 seconds, stopping an attack within moments of first sighting within the network. Cloudmark achieves an extremely high accuracy rate, catching 98%+ of all spam, with few to no false positives.
Products for Small-Medium Business
In addition to supporting the managed services offered by network service providers, Cloudmark makes available Cloudmark Server Edition for users of the Microsoft Exchange server. CSE offers simple out-of-the-box functionality with no reboot of the Exchange server, rules to write or lists to create. Exchange offers a drag-and-drop interface to provide instant response to users' corrections, significantly saving administrators' time. Mobile protection for Blackberry and Goodlink users to keep road warriors productive.
About Cloudmark
Cloudmark protects 2 billion global subscribers daily from an explosion in messaging abuses across more operator networks than anyone else. Only Cloudmark defends the world’s largest Mobile, Fixed and Social Media Providers, including AT&T, Comcast, MySpace, NTT, Swisscom and Time Warner Cable, with scalable and accurate protection against the widest range of existing and emerging messaging threats.