White Paper Abstract:
Email has become the dominant form of business communication - rivaling, if not exceeding, the importance of voice networks. Indeed, email has had such an extraordinary impact that, like the fax and ATM, it's hard to imagine life before its widespread adoption over the last decade. The very power of the medium has also attracted a disturbingly large and growing number of security threats - spam, fraud, viruses, regulatory violations and intellectual property theft. The volume and sophistication of email security threats continues to grow at an unchecked pace. Most customers observe that as much as 90 percent of their incoming mail is invalid (spam, viruses, etc), and the total number of incoming messages is doubling every year, even if the number of employees stays constant. These email security threats are fueled by a powerful profit motive associated with spam, fraud and information theft. This creates resources that bring professional engineers into the business of developing new threats, further exacerbating the situation. As this cycle does not appear to have a natural equilibrium, threats are expected to continue to grow in volume and sophistication for the foreseeable future.