Less Evil, Still Annoying: 92% of Emails are Spam
The good news is spam is a little bit less malicious than it used to be. The bad news is there's more of it than there was last year.
For regular internet users, email spam is not an uncommon occurrence. Some of it is fairly harmless, and some of it contains malicious links or attachments, but it's safe to say that all spam is annoying. But did you know that these annoying, junky messages account for all but 8 percent of emails?
A recent report by security firm Symantec claims that as of July 2010, 92 percent of all email is spam. Symantec's spam and phishing trends study recorded a 3 percent rise in spam, up from 89 percent, compared to last year's statistics.
It's not all bad news, though. The good news is that aside from being irritating, spam is slowly becoming less malicious. InformationWeek cites Symantec's study in reporting that spam containing phishing attempts has declined by 5 percent from June to July of 2010. Further, the number of unique spam sites is declining. Symantec says the number of unique phishing websites -- created by automatic attack toolkits -- decreased by 60 percent from June to July. However, unique URLs used in phishing scams increased by 10 percent, and non-English phishing sites have grown by 15 percent from June to July.
Finally, Symantec's report showed the trending topics for spammers and scammers this year. While last year's leading topics were Barack Obama and Michael Jackson, some of this year's more prevalent spam headlines have been the World Cup and the BP oil spill.
How much spam do you get on a daily basis? Let us know in the comments below!
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Too much. But less the usual.
The other 8 percent is on these boards.
The other 8 percent is on these boards.
I was expecting to see spam on the comments before i finished reading the title but after seeing your comment i realised he percentage is proberley the same here, about 92% of comments are spam lol
What do you know, spam comments in a spam news topic...
Hey look, there is a example of how annoying spam is in the comments!
Spam on boards is more annoying than that i receive to my email.
Dear customers, thank you for your support of our company.
toms hardware is now an online store advertising site, we are slowly phasing out all hardware relaed articles and reviews to give you nothing but shopping ad's.
all shopping all the time on toms shopping, no more psesky hardware just shopping, shopping and SHOPPING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Although I am reciving less spam. It is actually becoming more and more annoying. I've had a Gmail account since rather early on in the beta. At one point I was on about 1000 spam e-mails a day, with all of them going to my spam inbox. (yes If i didnt empty my spam box, it would easily be over 25000 in the 30 days clearing time for spam mail). Now I recieve about 300 a WEEK! A massive improvement and I didnt put any effort in. However about 2 or 3 of these e-mails sneak through to my actual inbox.
If you want annoying, those HP full screen pop-ups are the worst - I get them on Tom's every day at work, usually 2 or 3 times a session. Why they bother I don't know, as they are totally counter-productive. I mean I used to buy loads of that quality HP stuff, but now I just hate them and everything they stand for.
seriously wtf? are the spammers just mocking us now?
i know according to much of the pc hardware online community toms has been going down hill for quite a while but is it so bad now that no one running it even gives a shit about it?
i almost regret signing up as right now it just seams like i signed up for spam....
Bahahahaha i geuss this article's comment section is the offecial spam section now, this is the most different spam messages i have seen on any article
Give credit cared number - we 100% honest no misuse!Too good to miss offer! Drop ship accept - Let's facelift bar!
That whole post (as with bear_jesus') was rather good, the complete jibberish at the end made me smile though.
seriously wtf? are the spammers just mocking us now?
Yes
The worst thing about the keygen spam is people who dont know enough may be more likly to fall for it due to it being slightly tech related
What i hate most about all this spam is that there is no other site no the net tha i visit that has spam problems like this.... thousands and thousands of web sites i visit and only tom's has this problem, i kinda thought it woudl be logical that a compuer tech site would be more likly to be able to stop this crap....
haha ok i admit out of the thousands of sites i visit that's not one of them, i do visit sies for recipes but none of them have any spam... although most of them dont have a comments section
I never realised that this was mainly a problem with the .co.uk site, i geuss i shal be moving over to the usa site as well, after all here and hexus.co.uk are the only uk sites i visit regularly so it's not exactly an issue to me
Welcome to tom's spam, all the spam you can handle and 99.999% not relative to any kind of hardware.....
Hey look, all the spam has magically vanished! :-D
I guess they got the new forum software up and running. Unfortunately I think I was briefly mistaken for a spammer... hence my mysterious vanishing posts.
Ah, all's well that ends well!
Hey look, all the spam has magically vanished! :-D
I guess they got the new forum software up and running. Unfortunately I think I was briefly mistaken for a spammer... hence my mysterious vanishing posts.
Ah, all's well that ends well!
Sorry about that mate, I had a browser brain fart at the time.
we are slowly phasing out all hardware relaed articles and reviews to give you nothing but shopping ad's.
At one point I was on about 1000 spam e-mails a day, with all of them going to my spam inbox. (yes If i didnt empty my spam box, it would easily be over 25000 in the 30 days clearing time for spam mail).