Spam Activity

Spam is a notorious consumer of Internet resources. Spam is often wrongly dismissed as unsolicited commercial emails or texts that are benign. But very little spam is truly benign. 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. The bot itself and the thousands of emails each bot emits consume CPU, RAM, bandwidth, and storage from the source of transmission to the spam recipients’ devices. This is a defining characteristic: spam, whether email, messaging, or social media, is a predicate act that provides resources for serious crimes, e.g., 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.