Spam Activity

Spam is more than annoying and inconvenient. Spam is often wrongly dismissed as unsolicited commercial emails or texts that are benign.

What you may not know about spam:

1. Spam is often used in combination with malware or phishing to facilitate cybercriminal activities.

2. Spam is commonly transmitted from bots operating from cloud or hosting service accounts of compromised devices that host malware (spambots). Spambots are malware, installed without consent.

3. Spambots are abusive consumers of Internet resources. The bots and the thousands of emails each bot emits consume CPU, RAM, bandwidth, and storage from the source of transmission to the spam recipients’ devices.

All forms of spam, whether email, messaging, or social media, are most often predicate acts for subsequent crimes such as ransomware, phishing or malware.

We publish quarterly spam reports because we believe that measurements are necessary to drive informed decision making; however, the operational communities of the industry segments that cybercriminals exploit must commit to mitigation where they are able to do so. And to do so effectively, they must collaborate closely with cyber investigators, policy makers, legislators, and law enforcement.

For a summary of the most recent spam activity, read our most recent Spam Trends report.