Spam Email Levels the Lowest They’ve Been in 12 Years

The security firm Symantec just released its monthly report for June, and it’s got some good news for spam fighters.

For the first time since September 2003, spam emails made up less than half (49.7 percent) of all the email traffic sent around the world.

But mining remains the industry most affected by spam with a 56 percent spam rate, second to manufacturing and construction, the report said.

The level of spam rate has been steadily falling since 2010 as network provider have upped their ante against spasm and are taking fast action to filter or block them. Of those, 353 billion were classified as spam.

Also, unlike six or seven years ago, sending billions of messages per day from massive botnets isn’t as feasible anymore. Companies like Microsoft have worked with law enforcement and helped shut down the biggest botnets. At one of the peaks of the spam epidemic in June 2009, 5.7 trillion of the 6.3 trillion messages sent were spam.

Improved filtering and blocking also means that fewer unsolicited marketing messages reach inboxes where people might click on a message to buy a product. Symantec’s Intelligence Report may have seen a decrease in spam email, but other security problems are still in play.

The report said the rate for phishing attacks and email-based malware were also down in June, a development that suggests “attacks are simply moving to other areas of the threat landscape”.

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.

That means the use of ransomware and malware are on the rise, so while the numbers are decreasing, the emails themselves are becoming more risky.