June: 83 % mo' Phish!

[Geek-9pm]

Spam in June: Phishing Attacks on Facebook and Habbo Intensify
Business News:
Kaspersky Lab presents its spam report for June 2011.

The volume of spam in mail traffic increased slightly compared to May and averaged 83.3%. The most popular topics were Osama bin Laden’s death, the last Harry Potter movie the anniversary of Michael Jackson’s death.
New phishing targets

The amount of phishing emails remained unchanged and accounted for 0.02% of all mail traffic. However, there was a considerable increase in the amount of phishing attacks on social networks Habbo and Facebook, increasing by 6.25 and 4.07 percentage points respectively, pushing the sites up to third and fourth places in the list of organizations attacked most. The experts at Kaspersky Lab also predict a surge in spam linked to Google+ after recent signs that spammers have begun exploiting the growing interest in the new social network.
...
http://www.kaspersky.com/about/news/spam/2011/Spam_in_June_Phishing_Attacks_on_Facebook_and_Habbo_Intensify

It is not clear what ht 83% is., Maybe a typo.
Not mentioned in this article, eBay is warning users of new Phishing attacks toward eBay members.

[Salmon Trout]

It is not clear what ht 83% is., Maybe a typo.

Seems quite clear to me. From what you quoted: "The volume of spam in mail traffic increased slightly compared to May and averaged 83.3%"

It means that in May, spam email traffic was to all email traffic as 83.3 is to 100. Expressing the relation of a part to the whole in this way is called giving it as a "percentage", from the Latin per centum. It is a convenient method of expressing a fraction in a quickly (I thought) understandable way. The formula is (part/whole) x 100. That symbol like a slash with two little circles is called a "percent" sign or symbol.

If s is spam traffic and m is all mail traffic (s/m) times 100 = 83.3.

The figure seems to be in the right ballpark:

For some time now, spam has been accounting for upwards of 90 percent of all email messages.

(Threat Weekly, Kapersky Feb 2010)

With a share of 96.4 percent of the total email volume, however, spam remains at record levels. The top spam originators in July 2010 were the US, followed by Brazil and India. Germany dropped to seventh place.

(Web Host Industry Review, August 2010)

Spam – 72.9% in June (a decrease of 2.9 percentage points since May 2011

(Symantec Intelligence Report: June 2011)

...in fact it seems to have gone down a bit over the last year or so, but I guess concluding that depends on using comparable measurements.

[Geek-9pm]

Thank you for the explanation. I miss-understood.

So then, for every 10 n Emails that are sent to me, that majority, about 8 out of ten, will be some kind of unsolicited mail that is that is trying to get me to into something that I don't really want. That's a lot.

But does that not put a burden on the internet traffic system?

[Salmon Trout]

Thank you for the explanation. I miss-understood.

You still do partly, it seems....

So then, for every 10 n Emails that are sent to me, [...] about 8 out of ten, will be some kind of unsolicited mail

The portion of all email traffic between servers world wide added together which is spam is reckoned to be around 80 per cent but most of it is filtered out before it reaches your inbox by various methods which I would find too laborious to describe here. How much of your own email, whether you mean all that is sent, or what you actually end up with, is spam is impossible to say.

But does that not put a burden on the internet traffic system?

Yes.

[Geek-9pm]

N ow I got it. All traffic world-wide. Not just my inbox.
My Inbox is running much worse!

Quote
    But does that not put a burden on the internet traffic system?
Yes.

So who pays for this? It must cost something to have unwanted traffic on the system. Right? And there is nothing we can do  - Right?

[Salmon Trout]

So who pays for this? It must cost something to have unwanted traffic on the system. Right? And there is nothing we can do  - Right?

I guess the servers have to be bigger and more numerous than they would otherwise need to be, and more bandwidth need be provided than would otherwise be needed, or rather, increases in these things, necessary because of total internet traffic increases, are used up more quickly than forecast. It's hard to put a price on it although I daresay some people will try, and sellers of anti-spam solutions will probably make it seem bigger.

In January 2009 Ferris Research said...

Worldwide, spam will cost us all $130 billion; in the U.S. alone, $42 billion. That’s a 30% increase over our 2007 estimates, which themselves were a 100% increase over our 2005 figures.

and

The contribution of each cost component to the total is roughly:

User productivity cost (deleting spam, looking for false positives, etc.): 85%
 
Help desk cost (IT helping end users deal with spam): 10%

Spam control software/hardware/service (licensing fees, amortized capital costs, etc.): 5%

It depends how much you believe that when people are not coping with spam they are doing productive work, and how these things are measured...

[BC_Programmer]

The people/companies sending spam pay for the ability to do so. It's not like they can just plug in a phone line and start sending out millions of e-mails.