New spam tricks revealed; look a lot like old spam tricks

It's all too easy to think that spam is an old problem, and one that has largely been dealt with. Certainly, many people will tell you that they see very little evidence of spam in their mailboxes. This, however, has less to do with the demise of the spammer and everything to do with the effectiveness of spam filters. The latest Kaspersky Lab analysis of the spam and phishing threat landscape for the first quarter of 2015 suggests that some 59.2 per cent of email traffic was actually spam, which is good news in as far as that number is six percentage points down on the previous quarter. It's also a pretty good reflection of my own incoming email, which currently sits on around 55 per cent spam. Not that I see it unless it's that time of the month when I pay my spam folder a visit to check for false positives, and they are rarer than rocking horse poop these days.