Excedent Was First To Protect Email Hosting Customers From 'Bugbear' Virus

Blacksburg, VA (October 6th, 2002) - Excedent Technologies, a global leader in email hosting solutions, is proud to announce that its Virus Scanning technology was one of the first to block the latest malicious viruses to hit the Internet. The Bugbear worm, (also known as Tanatos), was blocked by Excedent's anti-virus technology from day-one of its inception; well before the virus definition files were made public.

Bugbear was first seen on September the 30th, and is the latest virus to raise serious concerns among specialists in the Internet security community. Bugbear is rated as high risk for home and corporate users. This mass-mailing worm attempts to send itself to email addresses found on an infected system. It also spreads through open network shares and has the ability to send print jobs to printers found on an infected network.

Once the virus is run, it will attempt to disable various security products, including many forms of anti-virus and personal firewall software. It will also attempt to install a backdoor Trojan that will allow a hacker access to the infected PC.

Current statistics show that Bugbear has passed Klez as the most common virus currently in the world. Klez has been the most common virus for almost all of 2002.

"Thousands of virus-infected emails arrive at the Excedent system each day," explains Bill Boebel, Chief Technology Officer of Excedent. "To date, not a single infected email is known to have made it through successfully. The Bugbear virus outbreak is a great example, as our system was blocking this virus even before the virus definition files were made public. This is because in addition to conventional virus scanning, our system also scans for all known email vulnerabilities, such as dangerously formatted messages that could execute code without user intervention. This is how we were so effective at preventing the Bugbear virus from reaching our clients."

About Excedent
Excedent is a global leader in Web-based and wireless email hosting solutions. Our mission is to provide companies around the world with a secure, reliable infrastructure to facilitate effective business communication. We work with small businesses and service providers of all sizes to deploy mission critical Web-based and wireless email systems. The company is privately held and has been serving clients since October 1999.