SYDNEY, Australia – 19 May 2008 – MessageLabs, the leading provider of messaging and web security services to businesses worldwide, today announced it has intercepted a Trojan specifically targeted at Australian domains. The email attack claimed to be from a government department and contained a malicious Trojan hidden within a Microsoft PowerPoint slideshow file. Both the file name and body of the email indicated images of a Hummer in Iraq with the sender’s email address hoaxing an Australian government mail server.

Andrew Antal, Country Manager MessageLabs said, “This email shows how convincing these attacks have become. The attacker attempted to fake the route of the email by inserting headers from a legitimate email sent four days before which was captured by the attacker.

“We believe the intention was to confuse email AV security scanners into letting the email through. The inserted section of the email header attempted to show the email had already passed safely through the MessageLabs infrastructure.”

The email attack, sent to a number of other domains within the Australian government, corporate and private sectors was stopped by MessageLabs’ heuristic scanner, Skeptic™.

Antal continued, “While we have seen targeted attacks in Australia before, this one was particularly sinister in that the attacker distributed the email as a “reply all” to the recipients of the legitimate email sent four days earlier, spoofing the senders email address. In doing so each of the recipients would regard the email as coming from a trusted source”

In this instance, MessageLabs’ Australian customers were protected before the threat reached their networks. Skeptic delivers unrivalled zero-hour protection from sophisticated and targeted security threats, monitoring, tracking and blocking them at the internet level.



About MessageLabs

MessageLabs is a leading provider of integrated messaging and web security services, with over 19,000 clients ranging from small business to the Fortune 500 located in more than 86 countries. MessageLabs provides a range of managed security services to protect, control, encrypt and archive communications across Email, Web and Instant Messaging.

These services are delivered by MessageLabs globally distributed infrastructure and supported 24/7 by security experts. This provides a convenient and cost-effective solution for managing and reducing risk and providing certainty in the exchange of business information. For more information, please visit www.messagelabs.com.

Media Contacts:

US:
Marissa Vicario, MessageLabs, +1 646 519 8116, mvicario@messagelabs.com,
Hill & Knowlton for MessageLabs, +1 212-885-0552, messagelabs@hillandknowlton.com

EMEA:
Paul Wood, MessageLabs, +44 (0) 1452 627705, pwood@messagelabs.com
Weber Shandwick for MessageLabs, +44 (0) 20 7067 0500, mlukpr@webershandwick.com

APAC:
Andrew Antal, MessageLabs, +61 2 8208 7171, aantal@messagelabs.com
Spectrum Communications for MessageLabs, +61 2 9954 3299, messagelabs@spectrumcomms.com.au