Spam email has existed for almost as long as email itself, long before it even first started being referred to as spam in the early 1990s. Less scrupulous advertisers discovered that they were suddenly able to reach thousand or millions of potential customers simultaneously for basically no cost, and spam mail quickly became one of the fastest growing blights on the internet.

The problem only became worse as more and more people came online, and for more than a decade spam has outnumbered regular email. Now for the first time in over 12 years, the overall ratio of spam to regular email has finally dropped below 50 percent, at least for some industries.

According to Symantec Corp’s June Intelligence report, a few industries have much higher rates of spam mail than others. The mining industry tops the list as the worst offender at 56.1 percent, up nearly a full percent from the previous month. Manufacturing sits just below at 53.7 percent, with Construction following close behind at 53.3 percent. Surprisingly, the industry with the lowest incidence of spam mail is Finance, Insurance, & Real Estate, with 51.9 percent.

According to the report, there appears to be no significant difference in the amount of spam a company receives based on its size, with businesses employing fewer than 250 people receiving roughly the same ratio of spam as businesses that employ over 2,500 people.

Symantec noted that some email related attacks, such as phishing and email-based malware, also saw a decline, but there was also a significant amount of new malware variants created.

“There were 57.6 million new malware variants created in June, up from 44.5 million pieces of malware created in May and 29.2 million in April,” the report said. “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.”

Photo by Charles Williams