(…and not the edible kind either!)
This is probably not headline news and as many of us will agree, we are constantly being bombarded with messages and junk which we simply don’t want. Google has released its latest annual spam report, and on closer inspection, the figures do look quite eye watering and a worry. The full report can be viewed here but we will look at some highlights and their meanings for the rest of this posting.
Perhaps one of the biggest statistics, and one which goes to the very centre of the problem, is the amount of messages Google released in relation to spam during the year 2016. This was reported to be 9 million and we can report that this figure has more than doubled since the same report in 2015. What this immediately reveals is that spam continues to be a major problem and despite attempts to remedy it (or perhaps control it as best as possible) it is still spiralling way out of control. This could be down to two main reasons:
1) The spammers are finding better ways of bypassing ‘filters’ and attempts to stop them.
2) The drive to tackle the problem simply isn’t aggressive enough.
It is interesting to read with this data that nearly 200,000 spam reports were sent from people right across the globe throughout the entire year! With this, you really begin to get a sense of the impact that spamming has.
The other main statistic which jumped out from the report was in relation to hacking. There has been a near one third increase in the amount of websites which have been hacked between 2015 and 2016. With the amount of new websites being added online all the time – many of these businesses which rely on a working webpage to function as an entity, this is deeply worrying and troubling. Actually, data shows that this figure is down from the 2014 – 2015 statistics (so some progress has been made,) but it still way to high – especially across the collective time period.
Similarly the question becomes what approach can be taken to hacking, and it is really the above – i.e. tackling it aggressively, and making it harder to do in the first place.
There is no doubt about the fact that these problems continue to rise, and it is not a one off either – they seem to be occurring year on year. The real question and issue becomes that as we do more and more of our daily tasks and ‘jobs’ online, who and what is going to stop these figures running away into the distance? As more people are falling foul to hacks and spam, who can find a way of stopping it? CV applications accepted now!
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