Phishing Fireworks Fail To Ignite End User Interest

Spam is either up, steady, or down. Depends on your source:

• Postini charts a spam surge of over 50% since December 2005.
• MessageLabs shows a fairly flat twelve month trendline for the average global ratio of spam in email (Jan 2005 - Jan 2006).
• Commtouch indicates that while spam outbreaks have doubled since May 2005, they have dropped significantly since January 2006.

While spam rages on, public interest seems to be waning a bit. Google Trends shows searches for either spam, antispam or junkmail have moderated since May 2005, and dropped 50% since 2004.

So what’s the current terror? If corporate press releases are your only news source, you can be forgiven for thinking users are cowering in fear of phishing attacks. Google Trends says otherwise.

Despite all the hoopla, searches for “phish|phisher|phishing” are seemingly executed less than 30% as often as “spam|antispam|junkmail”.

Don’t worry. Be happy.