Spam Gets Canned: Rates Drop Below 50% for First Time in a Decade
According to the latest monthly intelligence threat report from DLT partner, Symantec, spam has dropped below 50% for the first time since September 2003.
During June 2015, of the 25 billion email messages monitored by Symantec only 46.4% were junk.
So what’s behind the downward trend?
Symantec points to a number of factors including action against botnets (the networks of hijacked computers that route spam) by law enforcement agencies worldwide (such as the FBI) and faster action by network providers.
Coincidentally, it was also 10 years ago that the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) identified spam as an “emerging cybersecurity issue”. “Spam consumes significant resources and is used as a delivery mechanism for other types of cyberattacks”. In the intervening years, however, FISMA-compliance and other security guidelines, such as NIST, and enhanced email gateway protection technologies have helped agencies mitigate the spam threat.
Now for the Bad News
All good news, but while spam is on a downhill trajectory other forms of email threats are on the rise. Symantec found that malware and phishing emails dropped, yet 57.6 million new variants of malware appeared in June 2015, up 44.5 million from the prior month and almost double what was monitored in April. Essentially, one in 319 emails contained some sort of malware.
"This increase in activity lends more evidence to the idea that, with the continued drops in email-based malicious activity, attackers are simply moving to other areas of the threat landscape," wrote Ben Nahorney, a cybersecurity threat analyst with Symantec.
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