Tumbleweed Message Protection Lab detects Excel Spam hitting Inboxes

Redwood City, Calif. – July 24, 2007

News Facts

Tumbleweed® Communications Corp. (NASDAQ: TMWD), the industry's leading pure play messaging security vendor, today announced a new trend in spam - Excel files.
According to the Tumbleweed Message Protection Lab, spammers have been sending financial scam emails with Excel spreadsheets (.xls) attached.
Written in English, the documents are skillfully formatted and made to look like brochures
Email subject lines and attachments have financially oriented titles such as: “requested report72858.xls” or “detail invoice.xls”
There are two variations of Excel spam:
Emails with directly attached Excel files
Emails with attached zipped Excel files
The Tumbleweed Message Protection Lab, which has spearheaded this analysis, is a research facility established to analyze spam and study messaging security and protection.
The lab analyzes email traffic and trends to identify email threats such as spam, image spam, phishing and other types of email threats.
The Lab is staffed by experts who continually monitor worldwide spam outbreaks to identify new trends and tactics, and create and publish new heuristics to stop them.
Quotes attributed to Willy Leichter, Director of Product Marketing for Tumbleweed

“Spammers are continuously looking for ways to get into our inboxes and due to recent PDF success, they have now turned to Excel and will likely continue to exploit other applications to deliver spam.”
“It’s imperative to have an email security solution that is able to adapt to these new threats. As they did with image spam and PDF files, spammers are continually finding new ways to avoid detection.”
About the Tumbleweed MailGate Product Suite
The Tumbleweed MailGate® Product Suite is a family of products for protecting, filtering and monitoring corporate email, blocking over 99% of inbound spam. These best-in-breed products enable businesses to manage inbound and outbound traffic, block threats, encrypt messages and optimize network performance. MailGate products include MailGate Appliance™, MailGate Email Firewall™ software and MailGate Secure Messenger™ software, each optimized for specific environments and security challenges.

MailGate Appliance: A powerful and easy-to-deploy hardened Linux appliance, providing integrated network edge defense, anti-spam, anti-virus, content filtering, policy management, and outbound encryption.
MailGate Email Firewall: A comprehensive email security software offering, with functionality ranging from inbound threat prevention to outbound content filtering, monitoring and encryption.
MailGate Secure Messenger: A policy-based, secure message delivery solution that inspects incoming and outgoing mail and dynamically applies user-defined encryption and routing preferences.