Tired of receiving so much spam in your inbox? You're in luck as the percentage of spam emails has gone down below 50 percent for the first time in 12 years. However, this does not mean you're safe from cyber attacks.
According to Symantec's June 2015 Intelligence Report, junk emails now account for 49.7 percent of emails. This figure is a 1.8 percent reduction from May.
The report reveals that in June, 704 billion email messages were spotted by Symantec out of which 353 billion were spam. Symantec deploys its clients to assimilate the figure, so in actuality, the number of spam emails could either be slightly higher or lower.
So what has led to the decline in spam, you wonder? Unlike in the past, one can no longer send a billion messages each day via botnets. The legal repercussions botnets are faced with are a major deterrent.
Network providers have improved filtering and blocking methods, and also have quicker reaction times. Better blocking and filtering methods mean that less marketing messages, which are unsolicited, manage to make their way to a user's inbox. Moreover, the response to spam emails is minimal, so the spammers need to expand their reach to email inboxes to generate profit.
Now, the prevalent ideology is that if one is able to reduce the profit margin of a spammer, they will be able to reduce spam as well.
While spam rates may have dropped, it does not mean that you are safe from hackers as the report shows that nearly 57.6 million malware variants were created in June. This is an increase from 29.2 million and 44.5 million in April and May, respectively.
However, the email-based malicious software has fallen in June and Symantec is of the opinion that this is reflective of the fact that "attackers are simply moving to other areas of the threat landscape."
So what are the areas cyber attackers could be focusing their attention on? The answer lies in ransomware and crypto-ransomware, where the hacker locks and encrypts the files for a fee.
Symantec's report shows ransomware attacks have seen an increase for the second time in a row. Crypto-ransomware, on the other hand, is at its peak since December last year.
Photo: notoriousxl | Flickr
