retarus GmbH is one of Europe's largest messaging service and email security providers. Each day, several million company emails pass through the security filters in the retarus computer centers, where they are checked for spam and possible contamination with viruses before being forwarded to business customers. Since the beginning of this month, retarus experts have noted that the proportion of virus-infected messages in the total volume of emails has risen more than fivefold: whereas the number of affected emails is usually just under one percent, during the first days of June it reached levels as high as five percent. On two successive days, a prestigious client of retarus GmbH had an infection level of no less than 66 percent – only one in three emails to this firm was entirely free of malware!
In time for the World Cup and the launch of MS Office
The danger of these emails being opened unintentionally is even greater at the present time. That's because most of these trojans have been sent under the subject lines "FIFA World Cup South Africa...bad news" or "Outlook Setup Notification" to coincide with the start of the World Cup and the sales launch of the new Microsoft Office 2010 on June 15. The vast majority of these viruses consist of malware programs which are infiltrated into computers in order to make their computing and communications capabilities accessible to unauthorized persons without their users being aware of it. More recently, these trojans have been chiefly used to set up bot networks via which unwanted advertising emails are then sent – in many cases using the sender ID of the unwitting owner of an infected PC.
Usual suspects
As Oliver Pannenbäcker, Vice President Managed Services at Retarus, explains: "The current wave of trojans consists of three malware programs which are 'usual suspects', so to speak, but nevertheless dangerous. Specifically, we are dealing here with the trojans Mal/TDSSPack-Q,Troj/JSRedir-AR and TrojanDownloader:Win32/Rugzip.A. In order to ward off this kind of concerted virus attack effectively, highly sophisticated protective mechanisms are required. Every email that passes through our datacenters is checked in parallel by four different virus scanners which are updated continuously. Only in this way can it be ensured with a very high degree of probability that lesser-known viruses or new mutations of known viruses will be intercepted before they reach their intended recipients." Pannenbäcker sums up: "Thanks to the multiscan strategy which we pursue, none of these malware codes has reached any of our customers."
About Retarus
Retarus is a leading provider of professional messaging solutions and has been developing and offering services for electronic corporate communications since 1992. The company's portfolio encompasses large and medium-sized corporations, with service extending to more than 3,500 worldwide customers in various sectors. Customers such as Allianz, Bayer, Honda, Sony and Adidas rely on Retarus messaging services to exchange mission critical business documents. Retarus employs more than 250 dedicated professionals and holds offices in Munich, New York, Dubai, London, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Singapore, Sydney, Vienna and Zurich. Each of these employees makes Retarus' core service values customer focus, innovation, quality and transparency, their mission.
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