There was once a time when people used to be bombarded with spam emails that filled their email inboxes. But you may have noticed that you haven't received as much junk mail as you usually do, with fewer messages gathering in your spam inbox lately.

That's because for the first time in 12 years, fewer than 50 percent of emails were found to be classified as junk mail in the month of June.

According to the latest monthly Symantec Intelligence report from the security firm Symantec, after monitoring billions of messages, it showed 49.7 percent of the messages were spam with the numbers continuing to decline. While this number hasn't been this low since 2003, among the 25 billion messages Symantec monitored up until July 14, 46.4 percent were found to be spam.

The security firm's report is based on data from its clients, which account for about 2 percent of the antivirus market, but the number still reflects the current trend of legitimate emails being sent more frequently than junk mail.

The significant drop in junk mail suggests that sneaky cybercriminals have abandoned the spam email scheme to instead look for other ways they can make money from Internet users.

It's also harder for botnets, networks of computers that are used to send spam mail, to send billions of messages each day. That's because prosecutors have cracked down on the larger botnets to prevent them from operating.

Email services have also improved filtering and email sorting, which makes to harder for users to accidentally click on a random email and then open an unsolicited message.

Password phishing and email malware software also decreased in June; however, Symantec found that the rate of malware being produced has increased. In June, the firm detected approximately 57.6 million pieces of malware, which increased from 44.5 million in May and 29.2 million in April. Malware, or malicious software, includes spyware, keyloggers, true viruses, worms, or any type of malicious code that infiltrates a computer.

Ransomware attacks also increased for the second month in a row, the report noted, with the security firm detecting more than 477,000 attacks. In ransomware attacks, a user's computer information is held hostage until a sum of money is paid.

Via: BBC

Photo: notoriousxl | Flickr