Today we announced the results of that survey (see "Proofpoint Reports Findings of Email Security Trends Survey Conducted at RSA Conference 2010" for the full release).

Among the findings:

48% of respondents said their organizations had been the target a "spear phishing" attack. That is, they were targeted by a phishing email designed specifically to compromise their own email users.

59% of respondents said that their organizations have deployed an email encryption solution. An additional 19% intend to deploy such a solution in the future (most in the next 12 months).

43% of respondents said that effectiveness and accuracy is the most important factor when selecting an email security solution, while 20% said that "ease of administration" was the most important factor. 16% cited cost, 11% cited available deployment method (e.g., SaaS vs. appliance) and 6% cited vendor brand/reputation as the most important decision factor when selecting an email security solution.

Survey respondents were also asked about their top email annoyances. It's probably no surprise that spam and phishing emails that get through the organization's spam filter were the top two annoyances (39% and 27%, respectively). But certain types of legitimate email were most annoying for some of our survey respondents:

• 15% find legitimate email newsletters/marketing emails that are sent too frequently their top email annoyance.
• 10% find legitimate emails from coworkers or business contacts "that I just don't have time to answer" as most annoying. (Personally, I would fall into this camp!)
• 7% find social media notifications and other types of legitimate, but non-essential, emails as most annoying.

You can read our complete press release on the survey here.

RSA 2010 was a great show for us with a lot of customers and more than 1000 interested attendees who dropped by the booth. Thanks to everyone who took the time to stop by our booth! As promised, I do have a few video interviews coming soon to the blog. Stay tuned...

The posts in question from January and February of this year - which reportedly read "Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete hitman?" and "Had a good day today. DIDN'T want to kill even one student. Now Friday was a different story." - set off alarm bells for university officials. Inc. reports that the university does not have a social media monitoring policy, but a spokesperson said, "Given the climate of security concerns in academia, the university has an obligation to take all threats seriously and act accordingly."

As is common in article of this type these days, the Inc. story quotes Proofpoint's statistics about social media monitoring and related risks (download a copy of our complete DLP statistics here), saying:

Type "Facebook" and "fired" into any search engine and you'll get an ever-growing list of people who've stuck a foot into the wide-open mouth that is Facebook – and it's cost them dearly. A 2009 study by Proofpoint, an Internet security firm, found that 17 percent of companies report having issues with employees' use of social media, and 8 percent have actually dismissed someone for their behavior on those sites. In the previous year's study, just 4 percent were fired for their social media sins.

Been too busy at the RSA Conference to do much blogging yet this week, but look for a few new videos we taped at the show that we'll be posting over the next couple of days.

And if you're at RSA Conference 2010, please take a moment to visit the Proofpoint booth (#1132) and take our email security survey!

New features in Proofpoint 6.1 include support for mutli-protocol (HTTP, HTTPS) data loss prevention, a new data loss prevention dashboard (pictured at left - click for a larger image), encryption enhancements including an Outlook plug-in for the Proofpoint Encryption solution and a variety of other security and performance enhancements.

You can check out the full press release, which has a lot more detail, here:

Press Release:

Proofpoint Updates its Next-Generation Email Security and Privacy Platform
with Powerful Data Loss Prevention and Encryption Enhancements,
Available for SaaS or Appliance Deployment

In his article, "RSA: Toward a Trusted Cloud," Hulme describes the new Trusted Cloud Initiative and CloudAudit.

Hulme says, "I see both the Trusted Cloud Initiative and CloudAudit as an inflection point in the cloud security discussion. The industry is now moving beyond vague discussions and arguments surrounding the many security and regulatory compliance problems that arise from cloud computing – to taking concrete steps to address them."

The whole article is worth a read if you're interested in security issues around cloud computing and SaaS.

Also, we're giving away a $500 Apple gift card to one lucky visitor, so make sure you drop by and get your badge scanned. See you there!