Global spam levels fell by 49% during the second quarter of 2013, according to a new report from internet security technology provider Commtouch.
The latest Q2 Internet Threats Trend Report showd that the average daily spam volume reached 54 billion emails per day in June, compared to 97 billion per day during the first quarter.
Avi Turiel, director of threat research and market analysis at Commtouch, said that the spam and email security landscape becamemore diversified according to region during the quarter.
"The discrepancies between the development of spam levels globally and in specific regions such as Germany show that that the growing trend toward targeted spam and malware distribution has started to affect spam levels in a significant way," Turiel said.
"This trend has begun to transform the way spam and malware distribution works, posing new detection challenges for security vendors."
The global share of email spam fell by 64% in June, while Germany saw a high of 80.4%.
The firm put the rise down to huge spam volumes on June 25, which were the highest since November 2011as several German users were targeted by huge German-language spam waves that advertised online gambling sites.
During the quarter, researchers had also monitored spam campaigns in Spanish, Italian and Dutch.
The number of websites affected with malware was also on rise during the quarter, with 34% more malicious sites listed in Commtouch’s GlobalView URL filtering database were being tracked than in April.
Education sites topped the list of popular website category for malware distributors followed by business and travel websites.