Using Google Apps and Cloud Technology to Increase Business Effectiveness | Indianapolis Computer System Works

This post was copied directly from my Inbox and was received from the Postini Message Security folks.

Threat Advisory: Spam and Virus Trends

Postini data centers blocked more than 100 million viruses every day during the height of a virus attack in recent months. The majority (over 50%) of these viruses delivered through fake notices of underreported income from the IRS, and another large contingent of virus-infected emails included false package tracking attachments. Spammers also sent an email that asked for the recipient’s user name and password to their webmail account, and then used the compromised account to generate spam.

Postini continues to capture many of these phishing attempts before they reach your users’ inboxes. For unprotected mail systems, only a tiny fraction of the recipients need to be fooled for spammers to add hundreds of computers to their botnets every day.

For more information on this attack, see Spam & Virus Trends from Postini on the Google™ Enterprise Blog.

Best Practices for Virus Protection

Consider Early Detection for viruses: The Early Detection feature provides additional protection against zero-hour threats, which are emerging viruses/malware that are not yet captured in a virus definition file. With Early Detection, incoming messages that contain suspicious content are temporarily quarantined for deeper analysis and rescanned by the service’s antivirus engines with updated signatures. Early Detection targets messages with executable file attachments and messages that trigger the advanced anti-virus heuristics filter.

From our observations, we found that Early Detection successfully identifies and blocks zero-hour viruses in customer environments. Find out more about turning on Early Detection and how it works.

Use Attachment Manager to filter executable files: Most viruses are delivered as executable file attachments (for example, .exe or .vbs):

• Bounce or quarantine all system threats such as executables and encrypted compressed files.
• Enable binary scanning and scanning inside compressed file types.

For more information, see the instructions for Attachment Manager.