FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 20 May 2003

MailGuard protects over 400 Australian businesses against Palyh

Palyh activity jumps to dangerous levels in Australia

MailGuard, Australia's first and leading provider of outsourced email anti-virus, anti-spam and content filtering solutions for the SME market, has been busy over the last couple of days protecting tens of thousands of PC users against the new worm virus spreading rapidly throughout Australia.

Going by the two names of Palyh and Mankx, the virus has been identified as coming from a forged address, support@microsoft.com.

"MailGuard first stopped this (at the time unnamed) virus at approx 5:50pm (EST) Sunday evening. It was stopped as a suspicious attachment, and was flagged to our security engineers. During this time, we successfully stopped hundreds of examples of this virus from infecting our clients during the 18 hours until the fist signature release was available from anti-virus companies at 11:49am Monday (EST)," said Andrew Johnson, MailGuard's Marketing Director. "This is a traditional mass mailing email worm using the address book and our antivirus solution has been able to halt the worm successfully."

Between 2.00 to 3.00 pm yesterday [19 May 2003], MailGuard's filtering system detected (and blocked) that 1 in every 125 messages contained the Palyh. "Our UK and USA counterparts peaked at 1 in every 474 messages yesterday showing that Palyh appears to have taken Australia particularly by surprise," said Johnson.

"The spread of these viruses is frightening. Only last week we were sitting at 1in 600 messages being viral, whereas today between Fizzer-A and Palyh we have peaked at 1 in every 85 messages containing a virus".

Where many large organisations are protected because their systems block the .pif file extension, small to medium enterprises could be impacted because no advanced virus or filtering solution is in place. "You could say that curiosity could get the better of some of these smaller organisations which will trigger (and has triggered) the virus into its malicious activity," said Johnson.

MailGuard filters over 200,000 emails daily and today protects over 14,000 users against viruses, spam and email attacks. Some of the organisations MailGuard is protecting against Palyh include the Australian Football League, Multiplex Construction, Bakers Delight, Melbourne Zoo, Australian Business Limited, Australian Retailers Association, Australian Film Institute, Rivers (Shoes), Quiksilver International and Berry Street.

MailGuard does not expect a variation of the worm to develop and is confident that its detection levels will continue to protect every single user within its client base.

- ENDS -

Issued by Rivers of Communication
On behalf of MailGuard

Media enquiries
Craig McDonald, Director of Strategy, MailGuard, tel: +61 3 9694 4444
Dolores Diez, Rivers of Communication, tel: +61 3 9572 4552 / 0417 330 881
email: dolores@riversofcom.com