Clearswift backs UN calls for crackdown on sales of drugs via email

Clearswift publishes findings of its February Spam Index

London, UK – March 17th 2004: Clearswift, the MIMEsweeper company, today declared its support for the UN’s call to ban prescription-only drugs sales over the Internet. Clearswift’s spam index for February clearly reinforces UN fears that the web has become an increasingly popular sales channel for drugs such as Viagra, Valium and Prozac.

February’s figures reveal healthcare spam now represents over 59% of all unsolicited email, a huge leap from the 18% since the spam index was launched 9 months ago, suggesting spammers are becoming increasingly successful at exploiting an unchecked route for drug sales. The actual results of the February Spam Index were as follows:

March sees the 10th anniversary of the first spam email, posted to Usenet newsgroups to promote a lottery in the States. Yet spam has evolved into an un-policed, black market industry, selling potentially dangerous goods.

Clearswift’s Director of Research, Alyn Hockey cautioned, “As the spamming community celebrates its 10th birthday, we need to be more vigilant than ever in protecting against unsolicited mail. Organisations must be sure to both educate their employees against responding to spam, and duly configure their e-policies to combat the spammers’ latest tactics.”

The International Narcotics Control Board’s (INCB) believes that the internet market in controlled medicines is specifically aimed at susceptible people, such as addicts. Particularly disturbing is the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition warning that terrorists could launch attacks by passing off lethal drugs as well-know brands, with potentially devastating results.

Clearswift’s recently released MAILsweeper™ Anti-spam Solution provides a policy-based, multi-tiered approach to stopping spam by providing intelligent software that learns to recognize spam, and can be tailored to an organization’s specific needs. The Anti-spam Solution provides a high-level of spam detection while still allowing legitimate email to get through to intended recipients, without excessive administrative overheads.

The multi-tiered approach combines:

• Market-leading MAILsweeper™ for SMTP
• Clearswift’s new anti-spam filter which employs Bayesian classifiers, heuristics and textural analysis
• spamActive™, a spam database feed which updates customers 8 times per day

The figures, which were extracted from the thousands of unsolicited emails received by Clearswift on a weekly basis, are made up of spam generated by seeding email accounts and spam submissions forwarded to Clearswift by its 20 million users.

About Clearswift

Clearswift simplifies content security.

Our products help organizations enforce best-practice email and web use, ensuring all traffic complies with internal policy and external regulations.

Our range of content filtering solutions makes it easy to deploy, manage and maintain no-compromise email and web security for both inbound and outbound traffic.

Clearswift is the only vendor to offer comprehensive, policy-based content security in all three deployment methods: as software, as an appliance and as a managed service.

All three platforms are designed to take the hassle out of securing internet traffic, with a clear, intuitive management interface; automatic, 'zero-touch' updates; powerful reporting and common-sense policy management.

Twenty years of experience across 17,000 organizations has helped us raise security standards while simplifying security management at the same time.

We've helped many of the world's most successful organizations use the internet with confidence and are committed to staying ahead of the market and helping our customers defend against all emerging threats.

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