The most unpleasant thing about e-mailing systems is the spam that continues to pop out of our virtual window frames. No matter how we strengthen the filters, there will always be a spam to remind us about porn sites, shopping we are not interested in or amazing offers that will make us filthy rich.
A new report has however revealed that the level of spam has declined to below 50% of the total volume of e-mail for the first time in more than a decade. So prepare to say goodbye to all the useless call to action buttons that can be unnerving most of the times. Say goodbye to the frustrating habit of constantly deleting the spam that stuffs your inbox with irrelevant, useless and bulk information.
Symantec released a report for June 2015 and stated that the overall spam rate has dropped to 49, 7%. The last time when such a consistent low rate was reported happened back in 2003, when information was not as rapidly and randomly disseminated as it is now. The general spam rate was 52, 1% this year in April and 51, 5% in May. The manufacturing sector was the main target with major number of attacks in June, followed closely by finance, real estate industries and insurance.
It seems that the decline in spam happened due to the increase in legal action against botnets, faster reaction time by internet providers, strengthened blocking and much better filtering. In a world so exposed, resistance is the key and spam filters seem to cope well with improvement and resistance as well.
However, according to Symantec, malware and ransomware are on the rise. There have been reported more than 447.000 ransomware attacks in June only. It seems that with continued drops in e-mail based malicious activity, cyber attackers are elegantly moving to other areas of the threat landscape. Ransomware attacks have increased ever since they reached a year low in April. Crypto-ransomware was also increasing in June, attaining the highest levels observed since December 2014.
For the ones less exposed, the fact that e-mail spam rates drop significantly is great news. We will be able to treat our e-mails more kindly, without applying filters, categorizing them endlessly and continuously pressing the trash button.
Image Source: toddle.com