June Saw Lowest Spam Rate Since 2003
No, this isn’t a lie you’re being told by a Nigerian prince. If at any point lately you’ve felt like you haven’t been getting as much spam email, your instinct is probably right. More and more work has been done to combat spam in recent years, and it seems like noticeable progress is actually being made, at least according to Symantec‘s latest Intelligence Report. According to the report, June of 2015 saw the lowest percentage of spam email levels since September of 2003, nearly 12 full years ago. Though little can be done to 100% rid email of spam, the efforts done by multiple organizations to decrease the amounts of it are seeing real success, it would seem.
Symantec Found Under 50% of Emails To Be Spam
What’s a good number to use to recognize success in combating spam email? Based on Symantec’s Intelligence Report, 50% ended up being the marker, as this was the first time since the aforementioned September 2003 that spam email made up under half of our total emails received. Symantec went through 704 billion emails that were sent. Of those emails, 353 billion were spam email. That comes out to 49.7% spam email. It’s not that much less than half, but it’s still better than Symantec’s May report, which had 51.5% spam email, itself better than April’s 52.1%. And all of those numbers are far better than the worst of the spam email problem. That comes from Symantec’s report from June 2009, when they saw 6.3 trillion emails. Of those, an astonishing 5.7 trillion were spam email.
Efforts to Decrease Spam are Working
A lot of work has been done from a number of organizations to decrease the amount of spam email seen, and it seems to be working now more than ever. Companies like Microsoft have worked with law enforcement and helped shut down the biggest botnets. Improvements in blocking and filtering have made it harder than ever for spam email to make it into your inbox, and we’re seeing less of it. This, naturally, makes spam email less effective, meaning that there’s less monetary incentive to spam.
Spammers Can Try To Find Other Ways
If a spammer had the goal of infecting computers, there are other ways to do that besides spam email. And it seems they may be heading in those directions. Symantec’s Intelligence Report may have seen a decrease in spam email, but other security problems are still in play. The report saw 57.6 million new variants of malware in June, an increase of over 10 million from May. Ransomware and crypto-ransomware both also saw increases. It’s important to be wary of these in addition to spam email.
