Email Spam Surges to Highest Level In More Than Two Years - Lee Mathews

You may not realize just how many emails spammers send you on a daily basis. Most email providers like Gmail and Outlook.com do a very good job of keeping it from cluttering up your inbox. The reality is that we're all being bombarded by spam every day.

In fact, Symantec's latest monthly report shows that spam levels hit a two-year high in July.

Things have gotten so bad, Symantec notes, that spam accounted for almost 55% of all email that was sent last month. That's an ominous sign because many of those emails weren't just looking to sell you clothes or introduce you to eligible singles in your area.

Many are sent with malicious intent, either to trick you into opening an infected file attachment or click through to a phishing site in the hopes of stealing passwords or credit card details. According to Symantec, around 1 in every 359 emails was malicious.

That rate climbed even higher at organizations that employ between 251 and 500 people, to 1 in 260. There's a very good reason that cyber criminals are hammering away so persistently at larger targets.

You only need to look to recent entertainment news to understand why. HBO continues to deal with the fallout from a sophisticated hack that saw more than a terabyte of confidential data stolen including internal emails and both episodes and scripts of the immensely-popular series Game of Thrones. Attacks on this scale almost always being with an email compromise.

While some criminals are looking for a single big score from a large business, others are going after thousands of smaller targets with ransomware. Your best defense against the onslaught of attacks is to learn how to identify a phishing attempt. There are numerous tutorials that will teach you what to look for, including these ones from Apple, Microsoft and cybersecurity firm Proofpoint.

Lee Mathews