{"id":542,"date":"2011-02-28T14:44:50","date_gmt":"2011-02-28T22:44:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.nexthop.ca\/2011\/spam-levels-are-drastically-declining\/"},"modified":"2020-10-07T11:34:13","modified_gmt":"2020-10-07T18:34:13","slug":"spam-levels-are-drastically-declining","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nexthop.ca\/it-news\/spam-levels-are-drastically-declining\/","title":{"rendered":"Spam levels are drastically declining"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Email spam saw an enormous decline at the end of last year. One company\u2019s report shows a decrease of 150 billion spam messages per day from August to December. Although it\u2019s impossible to say for sure what caused this decline, these are some of the best guesses.<\/p>\n

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Inactive botnets<\/strong><\/p>\n

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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\u2019s spam at its peak. Rustock, along with 2 other major botnets saw a huge decrease in activity at the end of 2010.<\/p>\n

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Usually, when a reduction so significant occurs, it is due to a disruption in the network, which is fairly easy to repair. In Rustock\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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Anti-spam campaigns<\/strong><\/p>\n

Most spammers do their work in order to see profit. So, if they are not getting what they\u2019re looking for, they\u2019re likely to give up on that endeavor and try something else.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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Other outlets<\/strong><\/p>\n

One very credible explanation could be that spam isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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Although there is no way to know for sure what is causing the decline in email spam, these are some likely explanations. If you\u2019d like to read more on the topic, take a look at this article<\/a> from BBC News.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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