Spam Accounted for 72.9 Percent of e-mail in June 2011
Symantec recently released its June 2011 Symantec Intelligence Report, the first Symantec report to combine the best research and analysis from the Symantec.cloud MessageLabs Intelligence Report and the Symantec State of Spam & Phishing Report. This month’s analysis reveals that spam is currently at the lowest level it has been since the takedown of McColo, a California based ISP which hosted command and control channels for a number of major botnets, in November 2008. Since the shutdown of Rustock, the largest spam-sending botnet, in March 2011, the volume of spam in global circulation each day continues to fluctuate. Spam accounted for 72.9 percent of email in June, returning to the same level as in April earlier this year. According to Symantec Intelligence, 76.6 percent of this spam was sent by botnets, compared with 83.1 percent in March.
Spam remains a huge problem and spam levels continue to be unpredictable. Following the disruption of Rustock in March, approximately 36.9 billion spam emails were in circulation each day during April. This number rose to 41.7 billion in May, before falling back to 39.2 billion in June. During the same period last year, spam accounted for 121.5 billion emails in global circulation each day, equivalent to 89.3 percent of email traffic in June 2010. Over a twelve month period, a drop of 68.7 percent in volume resulted in a fall of only 16.4 percentage points in the overall global spam rate, added Wood.
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