Less Evil, Still Annoying: 92% of Emails are Spam
The good news is spam is a little bit less malicious than it used to be. The bad news is there's more of it than there was last year.
For regular internet users, email spam is not an uncommon occurrence. Some of it is fairly harmless, and some of it contains malicious links or attachments, but it's safe to say that all spam is annoying. But did you know that these annoying, junky messages account for all but 8 percent of emails?
A recent report by security firm Symantec claims that as of July 2010, 92 percent of all email is spam. Symantec's spam and phishing trends study recorded a 3 percent rise in spam, up from 89 percent, compared to last year's statistics.
It's not all bad news, though. The good news is that aside from being irritating, spam is slowly becoming less malicious. InformationWeek cites Symantec's study in reporting that spam containing phishing attempts has declined by 5 percent from June to July of 2010. Further, the number of unique spam sites is declining. Symantec says the number of unique phishing websites -- created by automatic attack toolkits -- decreased by 60 percent from June to July. However, unique URLs used in phishing scams increased by 10 percent, and non-English phishing sites have grown by 15 percent from June to July.
Finally, Symantec's report showed the trending topics for spammers and scammers this year. While last year's leading topics were Barack Obama and Michael Jackson, some of this year's more prevalent spam headlines have been the World Cup and the BP oil spill.
How much spam do you get on a daily basis? Let us know in the comments below!
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Jane McEntegart is a writer, editor, and marketing communications professional with 17 years of experience in the technology industry. She has written about a wide range of technology topics, including smartphones, tablets, and game consoles. Her articles have been published in Tom's Guide, Tom's Hardware, MobileSyrup, and Edge Up.
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Marco925 usually get half-baked World of warcraft phishing scams.Reply
Come on... I know that blizzard didn't purchase wow-blizzardbattle-passwordchange.net -
visa For those of you business owners out there, you can thank the spammers for the costs of implementing and maintaining a secure email system. Helps keep your IT providers in business at least :-/Reply -
Trialsking 92%, that definitely and A- for effort! Way to go spammers. You will make the Harvard Dean's list in no time@Reply -
filoz "Congratulations, you have won a free MacBook Pro from Facebook!Reply
Sent by: noreply@milliyet.com.tr"
Yeah, sure. -
maigo ReplyThe good news is spam is a little bit less malicious than it used to be.
Tell that too all the facebook and battle.net fakes I've gotten in the past 2 months -
JMcEntegart JOSHSKORNStill thinking about investing with that Bank of Nigeria.Reply
I can hook you up with a friend of mine who got in touch a while back. He has several squillion dollars tied up in holding because his family was wiped out in one fell swoop. He just needs €5,000 to free up his funds and then he's going to split it with me. Wanna go halfsies? Surely it's much more reliable than investing.
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braneman from how many emails I get about erectile disfunction, the entire country must be undergoing an epidemic, or overflow of placebos.Reply -
_Cubase_ If I had said yes to all of the spam emails I have gotten, I would be $20mil richer, own about 3 countries, 50 iPods, and have a penis stemming from here to Massachusetts!Reply