Bad News For People Who Love Spam E-Mails

(RTTNews) - People who love spam e-mails are in for a shock as the overall spam rate has currently dropped to 12-year low in June, according to Symantec intelligence report for the month on June 2015.

Symantec Intelligence aims to provide the latest analysis of cyber security threats, trends, and insights concerning malware, spam, and other potentially harmful business risks.

The report shows that the overall spam rate has dropped to 49.7 percent, the first time it has fallen below 50 percent of all emails scanned for over a decade. The last time Symantec recorded a similar spam rate was clear back in September of 2003.

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. Law enforcement, network provider and technology companies such a Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) have gone after the spammers aggressively.

According to June data, Symantec saw 704 billion email messages sent. Of those, 353 billion were classified as spam. At one of the peaks of the spam epidemic in June 2009, 5.7 trillion of the 6.3 trillion messages sent were spam, according to past data from Symantec.

The report also showed a drop in phishing and email-based malware in the month of June. This could mean that attackers are using some other means.

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.

This increase in new malware variants created shows that the continued drops in email-based malicious activity, attackers are simply moving to other areas of the threat landscape.