The latest Internet Security Threat Report from Symantec brings both good news and bad news for internet users, revealing that while most people are seeing less spam, we’re actually facing an increased threat from targeted attacks and mobile malware.

Over the course of the last year, spam accounted for ‘only’ 69% of all emails sent in the world – this is a big decrease from the year before when 75% of all emails were classified as “junk”, but still a whopping figure, with 30 billion spam emails sent out each day.

Out of this junk, we’ve seen a sharp rise in the number of mails hawking sex products and dating services, which now accounts for some 55% of all spam. Previously, emails offering pharmaceutical products were the number one irritation.

Malware and phishing scams continue to be a big part of our junk mail too, accounting for one in every 291 email messages sent across the world. And out of these, 23% come with thoughtfully embedded links to malicious websites in an effort to trick their recipients. Nevertheless, worry not, for Symantec says that email providers like Gmail and Outlook.com are working hard to protect us from these threats, with approximately 247,000 attacks blocked each day, 30% more than in 2011.

Hackers Getting Personal

That we’re all on the receiving end of a little less junk can only be a good thing, but the chances are that this is only because hackers are slowly changing tactics, switching to more targeted methods of infiltration instead of randomly attacking the Web.

Symantec reports a worrying 42% increase in targeted attacks around the internet. Such attacks average about 116 a day, leading to a comparable rise in acts of industrial espionage and data theft. Of these incidents, small businesses are finding themselves increasingly under the thumb, being targeted 31% of the time. According to Symantec, one of the main reasons for this is that SMBs lack the rock-solid security protocols employed by larger companies.

One particular type of cyberattack that’s becoming more common is the so-called “watering hole attack”, which involves infiltrating legitimate and trusted websites with code that redirects users to malicious websites. The redirect order, which is usually achieved by finding a vulnerability in the ‘trusted’ website and then inserting a HTML iframe into it, can happen so quickly that users have little time to prevent it. Once they land on the malicious site, malware is then installed onto their PC to seek out its precious data.

Another highlight from the report is the rapid rise of mobile malware. These attacks increased by 58% over the last year according to Symantec, with Apple’s iOS suffering through a whopping 387 vulnerabilities, compared to just 13 found in Android. However, Android continues to bear the brunt of mobile malware attacks, due to its popularity, its open-source nature and the fact there are dozens of unofficial app stores for the platform.