Tuesday, July 28, 2015

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. 


7 comments:

  1. I would still like to see spammers publicly flogged. And that goes double for those who throw pop-ups in front of me every freaking time I try to open a news story or watch a video.

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  2. The internet is flawed, seriously and fatally flawed. Anyone using it puts themselves and their data at risk. I have worked with computers since 1964 and have a BS in computer science and an MBA in computers. I am 100% positive that some of those serious problems with the internet itself could be fixed and many of them could be protected against at the individual user level. However those who write the code and make the decisions do not want to.

    Example: some sites are or can be problematic and you will experience problems in who they interact with your browser. The simple reason is usually the site manager has placed so many advertisements and "tricks" on the site that most of the interaction is some of the coding interfering with other parts of the code as they try to flood your screen with ads. I have seen sites that simply sit there and flash of and on because of so much interference. Why? Two points: 1. The language is being driven by the users to allow more and more "control". They don't want you the user to be able to stop them from opening up other windows or pull downs etc. They want to be able toforce your computer to do things that YOU don't want it to do so they can force you to see their ads. It serves no other useful purpose. It isn't there to enhance your experience or make your computer more useful. It is there to force you to see more ads.
    2. The companies who write the system software accept even embrace this philosophy. They are not building systems that protect you they are building systems that support and even encourage interfering with your use of the internet. Most of us have tried to prevent pop-ups and other distractions but it is increasingly more difficult to do. This is because the systems engineers have allowed and enabled these to continue.

    All of this could be fixed and most of the more serious problems could be fixed. But there are those who don't want it fixed.

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  3. Murphy's Law - I've always said that spamming should be a capital offense. Same for pop up or pop over ads, surveys, and the like.


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  4. Dont know who on here has ever administered mail servers, but it ain't fun.
    And dont know how it will get much movement either.

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  5. Dont know who on here has ever administered mail servers, but it ain't fun.
    And dont know how it will get much movement either.

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  6. Dont know who on here has ever administered mail servers, but it ain't fun.
    And dont know how it will get much movement either.

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  7. If you run Firefox, you can use AdBlock and ScriptBlock to stop a lot of those annoyances.

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