Spam Spam Spam Humbug
First of all, award yourself 1,000 geek cred points if you got the "spam spam spam humbug" reference without Googling (or Binging or DuckDuckGoing or whatever). However, that's not the story here. The real point of focus is that spam is now at its lowest level over a decade, according to security outfit Symantec.
In its June 2015 Intelligence Report (PDF), Symantec notes that the rate of spam has dropped to 49.7 percent. The last time Symantec recorded a spam rate below 50 percent was September...2003!
This is a big deal, and not just because spam is annoying (which it most definitely is), but also due to the security threat unwanted emails pose. Spam is a popular vehicle for delivering malware, both by way of infected attachments and URLs. So, it's not a surprise that Symantec also noticed a decline in phishing attempts.
"Phishing rates and email-based malware were also down this month. However, there were 57.6 million new malware variants created in June, up from 44.5 million pieces of malware created in May and 29.2 million in April," Symantec said. "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."
We'll probably never see the end of spam altogether, and being able to celebrate that just less than half of all email is junk is pretty telling. At the same time, it's also becoming more manageable. According to Google, its Gmail service thwarts 99.9 percent of all spam, and the company isn't stopping there. Google recently outlined some new ways it plans on reducing spam even further, including technological upgrades.
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