Techy Tuesday - Spam Drops to Lowest Level Since 2003

I stumbled across this story through a tech email I get, MakeUseOf, and they report that a Monthly Threat Report from Symantec says spam email accounted for 49.7% of internet email traffic in June.  This marks the lowest level since 2003, and is remarkably low compared to an all-time peak of 90% in June of 2009.  I know I haven't heard of any number that low being thrown around as the percentage of spam in email traffic.

The decline of spam is usually attributed to legal prosecution against botnets (including by major tech companies like Microsoft), faster reaction times by network providers, improved blocking, and better filtering. The main goal is to make the business less lucrative: If you can slash profit margins for a spammer, you can slash spam itself.

This is great news for not just email users but companies that are dedicated to fighting spam. Their business isn’t going away anytime soon, but they are making progress.

But keep on top of the security upgrades for your computer, no matter what flavor you use.  Symantec also reports 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.  The number of attacks from a nasty type of malware called Ransomware have increased for the second month in a row and the number of attacks by a particularly insidious version called crypto-ransomware reached its highest levels since December 2014.

This struck me as interesting.  Hope you find it interesting, too.