Spam levels are drastically declining
Business Technology | February 28, 2011
Email spam saw an enormous decline at the end of last year. One company’s report shows a decrease of 150 billion spam messages per day from August to December. Although it’s impossible to say for sure what caused this decline, these are some of the best guesses.
Inactive botnets
Botnets are basically networks of infected computers that account for the vast majority of global spam. Just one botnet, known as Rustock, accounted for nearly 50% of the world’s spam at its peak. Rustock, along with 2 other major botnets saw a huge decrease in activity at the end of 2010.
Usually, when a reduction so significant occurs, it is due to a disruption in the network, which is fairly easy to repair. In Rustock’s case, there seems to have been no disruption. So, the people who run the network must have just chosen to stop spamming, for whatever reason.
Anti-spam campaigns
Most spammers do their work in order to see profit. So, if they are not getting what they’re looking for, they’re likely to give up on that endeavor and try something else.
Anti-spam campaigns can really restrict the profitability of spammer networks. Recently, there has been a huge rise in anti-spam campaigns around the world, which has seriously disrupted these networks and caused many of them to close.
Other outlets
One very credible explanation could be that spam isn’t declining so much as it is just being transferred to other forms of media. Twitter and Facebook, for example, have recently become huge outlets for spam.
Although there is no way to know for sure what is causing the decline in email spam, these are some likely explanations. If you’d like to read more on the topic, take a look at this article from BBC News.
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Email spam saw an enormous decline at the end of last year. One company’s report shows a decrease of 150 billion spam messages per day from August to December. Although it’s impossible to say for sure what caused this decline, these are some of the best guesses.
Inactive botnets
Botnets are basically networks of infected computers that account for the vast majority of global spam. Just one botnet, known as Rustock, accounted for nearly 50% of the world’s spam at its peak. Rustock, along with 2 other major botnets saw a huge decrease in activity at the end of 2010.
Usually, when a reduction so significant occurs, it is due to a disruption in the network, which is fairly easy to repair. In Rustock’s case, there seems to have been no disruption. So, the people who run the network must have just chosen to stop spamming, for whatever reason.
Anti-spam campaigns
Most spammers do their work in order to see profit. So, if they are not getting what they’re looking for, they’re likely to give up on that endeavor and try something else.
Anti-spam campaigns can really restrict the profitability of spammer networks. Recently, there has been a huge rise in anti-spam campaigns around the world, which has seriously disrupted these networks and caused many of them to close.
Other outlets
One very credible explanation could be that spam isn’t declining so much as it is just being transferred to other forms of media. Twitter and Facebook, for example, have recently become huge outlets for spam.
Although there is no way to know for sure what is causing the decline in email spam, these are some likely explanations. If you’d like to read more on the topic, take a look at this article from BBC News.
Found this helpful? Subscribe to our newsletter!