Good news on the email front: For the first time in twelve years, less than half of emails are spam.
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The last time Symantec recorded a similar spam rate was back in September of 2003. Of those emails, 353 billion were spam email. While this number hasn’t been this low since 2003, among the 25 billion messages Symantec monitored up until July 14, 46.4 percent were found to be spam. That comes from Symantec’s report from June 2009, when they saw 6.3 trillion emails.
The significant drop in junk mail suggests that sneaky cybercriminals have abandoned the spam email scheme to instead look for other ways they can make money from Internet users.
Apparently the spam levels have been falling since 2010. Companies like Microsoft have worked with law enforcement and helped shut down the biggest botnets.
But it seems that the more people you hire, the fewer unwanted messages you send. Symantec’s Intelligence Report may have seen a decrease in spam email, but other security problems are still in play.
According to Symantec, these statistics give credibility to the idea that malware-based attackers are slowly starting to leave behind their traditional e-mail based activities and redirecting towards more productive areas.
Also, email has been around for a long time as an easy to use means of communication, so malicious attackers are also losing their prime victims – non-tech savvy middle-aged or elderly individuals who are just getting to grips with the service.
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But that doesn’t mean that everything was on the up-and-up: according to the report, there were 57.6 million new malware variants created in June – up from 44.5 million in May.
