Spam email suddenly quiet

For some unexplained reason the amount of junkmail that is sent across the globe has suddenly became quiet in recent months.  Paul Wood, a senior analyst at Symantec Hosted Services told BBC news, around the Christmas holiday, three of the largest spam producers hauled their activity, “But its hard to say why,” he added.

Networks of infected computers know as botnets send the most spam  and Rustock ,one of these botnets was at its peak responsible for between 47% to 48% of all spam sent globally. Mr Wood said ,.Rustock was responsible for just 0.5% of global span  in December and the two other leading spamming botnets, Lethic and Xarvester, also went silent. This has happened before with spam levels dropping and is usually because the botets have been disrupted but as far as we can see Rusrock is still intact, he added. Maybe the spammers are reorganizing with a new campaign.

Carl Leonard, a researcher at security firm Websense said,”Spammers are driven entirely by profit so if a campaign is not getting the returns they want, they can stop, regroup and try something else .
Since August the amount of spam has dropped substantially and dropped even further around Christmastime . In December one security firm only detected 50 billion spam messages that had been sent daily compared to the 200 billion spam messages that had been sent  in August and its a mystery as to why this has happened but the spam watchers say the lull may not last .