Notice less phishing e-mail lately? There’s a reason, hot shot: the volume of phishing e-mail has dropped from 0.79 percent of all e-mail sent to 0.49 percent. If we’re looking at just “bad” e-mail, though, phishing scams still make up the bulk: 86.9 percent of “bad” e-mail was phishing-related this month. That’s down six percent from July.
Why the drop in phishing e-mails in total, and as a percentage of “bad” e-mails? Web browsers now have better built-in phishing prevention; spam filters have gotten better, leading to less phishing e-mails even reaching your inbox; action taken against cybercriminals may be paying dividends; and, maybe users are becoming more educated so as not to click on links that read “citibank-login-account.com.”
You know where phishing is still alive and well? In World of Warcraft. You can’t walk around Azeroth without getting at least a few PSTs per night: “You have been selected by Blizzard to win a special five times experience card. Just log into wow-account-win.com for more details!” It’s quite annoying, and I wish these people would just go away. That, and the dumb corpse ads I’ve been seeing a lot of lately:
If you do nothing else today, tell your less computer savvy friends not to go around clicking on crazy stuff on the Internet. The Internet at large will thank you.