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The Military Says 85 Percent of All of its Emails Are Spam, Malware or Phishing

The military says it gets 600 million nefarious emails every month.

​Here is an insane statistic: The Department of Defense says that six-sevenths of all emails that the military gets are either spam or cyberattacks.

Major General Alan Lynn, who helps manage the Defense Information Services Agency, told a panel in Washington DC Thursday that the military is pounded by cyberattacks incessantly. He said 85 percent of all emails sent to the agency are nefarious.

"In a month's time, we get about 700 million emails … 600 million, there's an issue with them," Politico reported. "There's spam; there are attacks; there's malware; there's spearphishing."

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Those numbers seem almost impossible, but are actually somewhat in line with what other government agencies have told me in the past. In 2012, Thomas D'Agostino of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which safeguards the country's nuclear weapons stockpile, told me at a press event in Washington DC that the agency is "under constant attack."

A spokesperson for the agency put the total number of "significant cyber security events" at 10 million per day.

Of course, the overwhelming majority of those attacks are from bots, and most of them are thwarted easily. But the NNSA said that roughly 1,000 get through every day.

There's no real way of verifying the exact numbers other than by going on what these agencies say, and the US government seems to want to play up the frequency and seriousness of cyber attacks as it tries to bulk up its defenses against hacking with new legislation and increased power for intelligence agencies.

Lynn didn't say how often the Department of Defense is compromised, but those numbers make it slightly easier to understand how the military's CENTCOM Twitter handle was recently hacked.

And yeah, that number is unusual, regardless of how much spam you feel like you get. A recent report by Radicati, which analyzes trends in email, suggested that the standard corporate email account gets 85 emails per day, of which 10 are spam.