Security Issues Linger As Net's Trouble Spot; Worms, Viruses, Spam, More; But tech "police' making an impact in fighting bad guys bent on mischief, or worse.(INTERNET & TECHNOLOGY)

Byline: DONNA HOWELL

Jenny Craig slimmed down.

The weight loss company developed bulging e-mail in-boxes from a too-high spam intake. Now it uses outside help -- a spam-fighting service -- to cut the fat. That's a tactic many firms tried this year to stem a rising onslaught of online threats.

"We were having significant spam issues and starting to receive a number of complaints. I was noticing a lot of spam myself," said Jeff Nelson, Jenny Craig's technology director. Top name spam-filter software running on the firm's mail server "was not able to keep up."

What's working much better is an outside e-mail filtering service that prunes spam before it gets to the company. For that, Jenny Craig hired Postini and also considered MessageLabs, both privately held firms. Using the service costs about the same as the old way, Nelson says. He's now able to turn his attention to other security issues, such as whether the benefits of adding Wi-Fi wireless networking outweigh the added security risk.

Many companies and consumers got snowed under by security issues in 2004. The number of viruses, worms and spams rose.

"This year was a combination of stuff," said Vincent Weafer, security firm Symantec's director of security response. "In the first half of the year, we had all the mass mailers (e-mail viruses)." Since midyear, fraud-related attacks and spyware have taken off, he says.