Kaspersky Lab: Spam mail edges up in 2016 first time since 2009

MOSCOW, Mar 2 (PRIME) -- The share of spam in the world mail traffic rose by 3 percentage points in 2016 to 58.3%, the first time since 2009, Russian antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab said late on Wednesday in a research note.

“A change in the trend makes us think that we see a new wave of spam progress as a tool. Bulk mailing will hardly be on the old scale, but at least in 2017 we think the trend will continue with a huge volume of spam with encoders,” Darya Gudkova, head of the company’s content analyst department, said.

The share of spam tumbled to 55.3% in 2015 from 85.2% thanks to a corporate shift to legal advertising platforms. A slight increase in 2016 resulted from a higher number of messages with attached malware, the experts said.

According to the research, the bulk of spam, or 12.1%, originated from the U.S., which was followed by Vietnam with 10.3% and India with 10.2%. Russia with 3.5% was the seventh.

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