Last week, IBM released its Mid-Year Trend and Risk Report. In the report, they remark that phishing had fallen dramatically in the last six months. Of all the spam sent, phishing now only represents 0.1%. Does this mean that the security industry has solved the phishing problem? If only it were so.
One-tenth of one percent. One in a thousand. A minuscule amount. Minuscule that is until one stops to consider just how much spam gets sent on a daily basis. How much is that? Estimates vary. Let’s assume that spam volumes haven’t changed much in the past 16 months. This means that over 100 billion pieces of spam are sent every day.
Or in other words, there’s still over 100 million phishing messages getting sent each day. Sigh. Better put that champagne back in the wine cellar for now.
Actually, to answer the question, it means IBM doesn’t know squat about phishing. Volumes are not way down, and we’ve confirmed that across the board with most of the anti-phishing vendors.