Spam in the form of email has seen a drastic decline in the last few months. One report shows a fall from 200 billion spam messages being sent each day in August to only 50 billion per day in December. It’s hard to say precisely why this has happened, but there are a few theories.
Inactive botnets
Botnets are networks of infected computers which account for the majority of the world’s spam. Just one of the botnets, Rustock, was responsible for nearly 50% of all global spam at its peak. Rustock, along with two of the other prominent botnets stopped churning out so much spam in December.
Typically, when botnets stop producing spam it is due to a temporary disturbance in the network, but at least one of the three major botnets still seems to be intact. It could be that the people running the networks are just deciding to stop spamming, for whatever reason.
Anti-spam campaigns
Most spammers do what they do 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 possible 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.
