Excedent Customers Not Affected by Recent Sendmail Security Flaw

Blacksburg, VA (March 4, 2003) - Excedent Technologies, a global leader in business email hosting, anti-virus and Spam filtering solutions, today announced that the latest security flaws found in the Sendmail Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) do not affect Excedent email customers. "Many of our customers were worried that our email system might be exposed to the recently announced Sendmail vulnerabilities," explained Pat Matthews, CEO of Excedent Technologies.

"The prevalence of Sendmail on Unix and Linux servers makes this flaw an enormous security concern," said Bill Boebel, CTO of Excedent. "For this reason we decided long ago to run our applications on Immunix security hardened operating systems (www.immunix.com). Immunix technology makes our applications security bug tolerant. Even if security vulnerabilities are found in a vendor's product (such as Sendmail), the vulnerability is no longer exploitable because of the Immunix protection. Our servers are defended against all known hacker exploits, including "buffer overflow," "format string," and "race condition" attacks.

Sendmail recently announced "the discovery of a security vulnerability in the Sendmail Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) that can give an unauthorized person the ability to gain remote root access to a targeted system.

Sendmail has over 6,000 enterprise email customers; they provide email to 7 of the Fortune 10 companies and virtually every Unix/Linux server in the world has their free software installed, all of which are vulnerable to this flaw.

About Excedent
Excedent Technologies is a global leader in business email hosting solutions, providing small businesses and service providers around the world with secure, reliable, Spam-free, Virus-free email. The company is privately held and serves more than 1,000 customers worldwide.