![\"EmailSpamandPhishingTrends\"](\"http:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/emailspamandphishingtrends.jpg\")
Think you know spam? Think again. A bevvy of reports, all from valid and seemingly unimpeachable sources, have sprung up over the last year discussing the state of e-mail spam, and \u2013 surprise, surprise \u2013 no two reports seem to be able to agree on what\u2019s happened to spam since Rustock was nuked off the face of the Earth.<\/p>\n
My my. It\u2019s like a bad April Fool\u2019s Day prank, or at least near<\/em> April Fool\u2019s Day. It\u2019s Friday, April 6, Good Friday, and the coffee is particularly warm and delicious for some reason. You pick up a copy of The Wall Street Journal<\/em> \u2013 or, more accurately, sashay over to the WST<\/em> web site \u2013 and browse the political section, having a few ripe chuckles at the expense of any one of the U.S. Presidential candidates. Then you tackle the word jumble and upon solving it, you wonder just how many ways The Hunger Games<\/em> can find its way into modern pop culture \u2013 et tu, Wall Street Journal<\/em>? Finally, you land on the Tech section, firmly expecting to read yet another story about Steve Jobs. Perhaps this one will be the much anticipated announcement by the Vatican that the dear departed Apple guru will be canonized. Saint Steve? Why not? Richard Branson\u2019s been knighted, is all I\u2019m saying.<\/p>\n To your immense surprise, you don\u2019t see dark and mysterious rumors surrounding some groundbreaking new device created by Apple and poised to exploit the credit cards and kidneys of kids<\/a> everywhere \u2013 iToaster, anyone? How about iVacuum, or iExpresso? No, instead you\u2019re greeted with yet another article pitching the latest report about the state of e-mail spam. Yawn<\/em>. Saint Jobs would be most fiery and brimstoney if he knew. Still, it is Good Friday and you have nothing better to do until mass at 3:00. So before using the virtual newspaper to line the virtual birdcage in your virtual penthouse, you go ahead and read the article, unsure of what it\u2019s going to tell you. After all, the title is extremely mysterious and doesn\u2019t give anything away. \u201cGlobal Email Spam Falls<\/a>.\u201d Confusing, isn\u2019t it? It\u2019s like some elaborate riddle, created by Watson<\/a> the supercomputer, encrypted using a 1,024 bit key, scrawled on a piece of paper in Egyptian hieroglyphics, and then digested by a meerkat for good measure. This one will make the Hunger Games<\/em> jumble seem like the answer was something more obvious, like Twilight: New Moon<\/em>. It will require all your gray matter to decipher this one, but since the coffee is particularly delicious this morning, you believe you\u2019re up to the task.<\/p>\n The state of spam, the story informs you, has dropped substantially, according to a report released this week<\/a> by Commtouch. This time last year, the number of spams being sent globally were ticking in at around 150 billion per day. In the first quarter of this year, the report goes on to state, daily spam rates were at about 94 billion per day. States Commtouch CTO Amir Lev, \u201cspam is still four times the level of legitimate email and cybercriminals are increasing their revenues from other avenues, such as banking fraud malware.\u201d<\/p>\n Whew. It was tricky, but it looks like we\u2019ve solved the mystery. According to this cipher, global e-mail spam rates are down. This seems to be in sync with IBM X-Force, which published its annual 2011 Trend and Risk Report<\/a> in March. This report also reported that spam is on the decline and attributes this to the high profile takedowns of botnets like Rustock; but it doesn\u2019t go as far as identifying daily numbers and instead focuses on how certain types of spam \u2013 like image spam containing malicious attachments or links to malicious sites \u2013 are on the increase. Bottom line: the spammers are getting smarter, something we\u2019ve been seeing for a while now.<\/p>\n