Cisco: Spam is making a big-time comeback

Spam is making a surprising resurgence as a threat to corporate security and becoming a more significant carrier of attacks as varied as spear phishing, ransomware and bots, according to Cisco’s 2017 Annual Cybersecurity Report.

The company’s 10th such report says spam is way up. It accounts for 65% of all corporate email among customers who opted in to let the company gather data via telemetry in Cisco gear.

Whereas spam had been knocked down as a threat in 2010 and kept at relatively low levels through 2015, it made a surge in 2016. In 2010, Cisco recorded 5,000 spam messages being sent per second. That number stayed generally below 1,500 for the next five years, spiking to about 2,000 briefly in 2014. But in 2016 it leaped to more than 3,000.

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