According to the latest report by Symantec, overall spam rates have dropped below 50 percent. The last time Symantec recorded a similar lower spam rate was 12 years ago in September 2003. This is great news for not only the email users, but also for the companies that are dedicatedly fighting against spam.

Overall spam rates have dropped below 50 percent, what did Symantec said about this?

Symantec’s Ben Nahorney said in the report.”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.”

The security firm saw 704 billion email messages sent in June and out of those 353 billion emails were classified as spam. According to the previous data from Symantec, in June 2009, 6.3 trillion email messages were sent and out of those 5.7 trillion were classified as spam.

1. “57.6 million new malware variants were created in June, up from 44.5 million pieces of malware created in May and 29.2 million in April.”
2. “Ransomware attack has increased for the second month in a row and crypto-ransomware has reached its highest levels since December 2014.”

The spam rates have dropped below 50 percent due to the combined efforts of all. It includes legal prosecution against botnets, improved blocking, better filtering and faster reaction times by network providers. The drop in spam rates indicates that cyberattackers or hackers are focusing their efforts on some other ways to make money. Ransomware, crypto-ransomware, malware based attacks; where files are encrypted and locked for a fee are increasing these days.