Cisco’s Security Intelligence Operations is out with a new report, Email Attacks: This Time It’s Personal, showing a stark decline in the value and volume of mass email based attacks
“This report lays out a true tipping point in what we believe to be the nature of attacks,” Patrick Peterson, Cisco Fellow, said during a live WebEx event. “The criminal successes and focus have migrated from the things that used to consume us 24/7 four or five years ago.”
Those items that used to consume Peterson’s time were the mass attacks from spam, spyware and phishing. He noted that criminal profits from spam and mass attacks began to decline dramatically in 2010.
According to Cisco’s research, spam volumes have declined from a peak of 300 billion daily spam messages to an average of only 40 billion between June 2010 and June 2011. Criminal revenues from the mass attacks have also declined. According to Cisco, revenues from mass based email attacks brought in $1.1 billion in June 2010 and have now declined to $500 million in June 2011.