Targeted Trojans: A New Online Threat to Businesses

Overview

It isn't bad enough that of the 300 million emails that MessageLabs scans for its clients every day, 75 percent of them are spam and 3 million contain viruses. But now, there is a new and alarming trend of custom viruses being sent to high-ranking business officials such as CIOs, CEOs and more, in organizations in important vertical industries and government. Carried in convincingly written emails with innocuous looking office attachments such as documents, presentations or spreadsheets, these viruses steal important business information and send it to criminals around the world. Such deceptive emails are created by exploiting an abundance of personal and corporate information online, on social networking and corporate web sites, and found via search. MessageLabs has observed dramatic increases of this kind of activity in 2007, and more are sure to follow, as this represents some of the most advanced spamming techniques yet, with the highest potential payoff for the spammers. What's more, these viruses easily exploit weaknesses in traditional antivirus protection, which looks at widespread attacks and only then releases reactive signature updates.

In this succinct white paper, you'll learn more about these threats, and about the distinct advantages of the MessageLabs Email and Web Security solutions in thwarting them, thanks to our advanced proprietary technology, which performs additional levels of attachment analysis, but, unlike other security technologies, doesn't release any after-the-fact security updates, against which criminals test their latest viruses.