St. Bernard Tracks Summer Slowdown in Spam and Virus Activity
St. Bernard Software, Inc. (OTCBB: SBSW), a global provider of security appliances and on-demand solutions, including secure content management and archiving, today announced its Threat Center researchers tracked a decrease in the volume of email during Summer 2007. However, with school in full swing and employees returning from vacation, the company predicts an increase in spam and viruses and social networking site visits in coming months.
The average number of messages St. Bernard’s customers receive per day dropped by nearly 10% from July to September. In addition, viruses declined from approximately 4% of all customer email in July to 1.8% in September. On average, the company blocked 90% of inbound messages as junk. This is consistent with a study Nucleus Research conducted earlier this year, which estimates at least 90% of email reaching corporate servers is spam. Furthermore, the firm approximates the “spam epidemic” costs US businesses $712 per employee each year in lost worker productivity.(1)
As the new school year is ramping up, St. Bernard is seeing a traffic increase to social networking sites. During the month of September, its Threat Center researchers increased the number of categorized “social network” sites in its iGuard(TM) database by 9%. This is double the typical rate of additions. As students increasingly visit them to interact with classmates, St. Bernard expects this trend to further escalate next month.
“With students and employees returning from vacation, we expect a spike in online activity, including spam and virus volume and visits to inappropriate Web sites,” said Andrew Lochart, vice president of marketing and product management at St. Bernard. “Hundreds of thousands of new student PCs will be put on poorly protected school and university networks, creating new zombies and more spam from risky web surfing and downloading. Schools and businesses that don’t filter web access are leaving their networks wide open.”
St. Bernard provides both appliance and hosted security solutions, iPrism(R) and LivePrism. iPrism is a web-filtering appliance that is simple to install, configure and manage. It provides protection from online threats in HTTP, instant messages (IM) and P2P traffic, including spyware, malware and phishing, and prevents Internet abuse by managing web access. LivePrism is an on-demand solution that offers a broad range of hosting and security filtering products, including email, web and IM filtering that blocks viruses and spam, and secure archiving of email and IM.
For more information on how St. Bernard meets the secure content management and messaging security needs of businesses, please visit www.stbernard.com.
About St. Bernard
St. Bernard Software, Inc. (OTCBB: SBSW) is a global provider of security appliances and hosted solutions, including secure content management and archiving. The company’s award-winning products deliver innovative security solutions that offer the best combination of ease-of-use, performance and value.
Established in 1995 with headquarters in San Diego, CA and international offices in the United Kingdom, Australia and the Netherlands, St. Bernard sells and supports its products directly and through solution partners worldwide. For more information, please visit www.stbernard.com.
Copyright2007 St. Bernard Software, Inc. All rights reserved. The St. Bernard Software logo, LivePrism, iPrism, and iGuard are trademarks of St. Bernard Software, Inc. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are hereby acknowledged.
This press release may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that, if they prove incorrect, could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including, among other things, any projections of earnings, revenues, or other financial items; any statements of the plans, strategies, and objectives of management for future operations; any statements concerning proposed new products, services, or developments; any statements regarding future economic conditions or performance; statements of belief and any statement of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. The risks, uncertainties and assumptions referred to above include, among other things, performance of contracts by customers and partners; employee management issues; the timely development, production and acceptance of products and services and their feature sets; the challenge of managing asset levels, including inventory; the flow of products into third-party distribution channels; and the difficulty of keeping expense growth at modest levels while increasing revenues. These and other risks and factors that could cause events or our results to differ from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements are described in our most recent annual report on Form 10-KSB, as well as other subsequent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We assume no obligation and do not intend to update these forward-looking statements.
(1) ‘Nucleus Research: Spam costing US businesses $712 per employee each year,’ April 2, 2007: http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/?viewID=news_view_popup&newsLang=en&epi-content=NEWS_VIEW_POPUP_TYPE&beanID=1239083340&ndmHsc=v2*N1000124&newsId=20070402005669
Media contact: Aida Causevic / Amy White LEWIS PR (619) 677-2700 Email Contact Lorrie Hunsaker St. Bernard (858) 524-2041 Email Contact
SOURCE: St. Bernard
