Security experts claim spam levels are at a 12 year low

Spam levels are at their lowest point in more than a decade, meaning that computer users are getting less junk in their email accounts. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on who you ask), there isn’t an ongoing shortage of canned luncheon meats.

According to BBC News, computer security firm Symantec has found that people are being sent fewer spam emails now than at any other point over the past 12 years, and that fewer than half of the emails scanned using its software were unsolicited junk messages – the lowest percentage in more than a decade, claims the California-based company in a recent report.

The company attributed the trend to recent legal action against criminal networks responsible for much of the spam, and said cybercriminals are turning to other methods to make money off of people surfing the Internet. For instance, they told the British news outlet that the decline in spam had been offset by a spike in the amount of malware being circulated.

Spam is down, but malware and ransomware are on the rise

In its most recently monthly threat report, Symantec said that just 49.7 percent of the messages it monitored were junk email, marking the first time that figure dropped below the 50 percent mark since 2003. Since then, it has continued to fall, and as of July 14, only 46.4 percent of the emails monitored by the company qualified as spam.

The firm explained that the decline was due to the pursuit of legal action against botnets, or networks of hijacked computers typically used to transmit spam, according to BBC News. In the last 10 months, UK police officials had been involved in the takedown of at least seven different botnets, and many European ISPs have started sharing information about these groups’ activities in order to limit their spam-spreading effectiveness.

Symantec’s report also said that phishing scams and emails with malware attachments declined during the month of June, but that there had been a significant increase in the amount of different types of malware being produced. In fact, nearly 58 million individual pieces were caught during the month, or nearly double the amount found in April. Ransomware, or software that holds a computer hostage until a fine is payed to the hacker, was also on the rise, with nearly 500,000 such attacks observed in the month of June.

“This increase in activity lends more evidence to the idea that, with the continued drops in email-based malicious activity, attackers are simply moving to other areas of the threat landscape,” Ben Najorney, a Cyber Security Threat Analyst at Symantec, explained in the report.

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