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.

SAFE HARBOR STATEMENT
Tumbleweed cautions that forward-looking statements contained in this press release are based on plans and expectations as of the date of the press release, and that a number of factors could cause the actual results to differ materially from the guidance given at this time. These factors are described in the Safe Harbor statement below.

Except for the historical information contained herein, the matters discussed in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected, particularly with respect to Tumbleweed’s ability to identify new trends and tactics in email threats and provide solutions that address these threats in a timely manner. In some cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as “may,” “will,” “should,” “potential,” “continue,” “expects,” “anticipates,” “intends,” “plans,” “believes,” “estimates,” and similar expressions.  For further cautions about the risks of investing in Tumbleweed, we refer you to the documents Tumbleweed files from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, particularly Tumbleweed’s Form 10-K filed March 14, 2007 and Form 10-Q filed May 10, 2007.

Tumbleweed assumes no obligation to update information contained in this press release. Although this release may remain available on Tumbleweed’s website or elsewhere, its continued availability does not indicate that Tumbleweed is reaffirming or confirming any of the information contained herein.

About Tumbleweed
Tumbleweed Communications Corp. (NASDAQ:TMWD), the industry’s leading pure play messaging security vendor, provides world-class innovative messaging security solutions for organizations of all sizes.  Organizations rely on Tumbleweed's solutions to securely manage their Internet communications, spanning email management to file transfers. Tumbleweed has nearly 2,700 customers worldwide, representing industries such as Finance, Healthcare, and the U.S. Government. The world’s most security conscious organizations rely upon Tumbleweed technology including Bank of America Securities, JP Morgan Chase & Co., the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the U.S. Department of Defense. Our award-winning products build on fourteen years of R&D and 26 security patents in the U.S. alone – many of which are licensed by other security vendors. More information can be found at www.tumbleweed.com.

Tumbleweed, MailGate, MailGate Appliance, MailGate Email Firewall and MailGate Secure Messenger are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Tumbleweed Communications Corp. in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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