Spam Levels Declined by as Much as 30 Percent During Last Quarter of 2010

According to a report from security provider Commtouch, the daily spam levels have declined by as much as 30% during Q4 2010, compared to months from the previous quarter.

Spam volume has been on a downward trend since the beginning of October, when the Spamit rogue online pharmacy affiliate program closed down.

This allegedly resulted from criminal charges being brought against the Russian man suspected to have ran the whole operation.

Spamit was responsible for the majority of pharma spam on the Internet, including the notorious Canadian Pharmacy campaigns, and worked with people behind some of the world's largest spam botnets.

Commtouch reports a drop of 18% in global spam levels for October compared to September, even though the middle of the month saw one of the two large outbreaks of the quarter.

Spam levels averaged throughout the quarter at 83% of the overall email traffic, 5% lower than the 88% registered during Q3 2010.

However, December's daily average spam traffic was 30% less than September's, which is very unusual for this month considering the holiday season.

Furthermore, the lowest spam level during the fourth quarter, around 74%, was registered at the beginning of December.

"The nature of the spam attacks has also clearly changed. The pre-October graph shows large fluctuations in the amounts of spam sent. In Q4 2010 there were generally lower fluctuations – aside from two large outbreaks in mid-October and mid-December.

"The large amounts of pre-Christmas spam are something of a tradition, but here too the outbreak was smaller than most of the large outbreaks this year," the Commtouch researchers note.

While these findings are consistent with those of other security providers, everyone seem to be skeptical over the long-term improvement. This is because such unusual declines have been observed in the past after major takedowns or other spam-affecting events, only to return to even higher levels than before.