Ofcom UK Blocked 481,521 Malicious Emails Over the Past 3 Years
A recent Freedom of Information (FOI) request has revealed that the UK telecoms, internet content and media regulator, Ofcom, blocked a total of 481,521 “malicious emails” between June 2023 and February 2026 (472,936 phishing and 8,585 malware emails). But this figure excludes SPAM (junk marketing) emails, which are likely to be much higher.
The data itself isn’t particularly surprising for a large regulatory organisation like Ofcom, which has public email addresses and is almost certain to attract plenty of robotic junk and security probes. However, it does help to highlight how much of a problem this issue is for modern online organisations, although the key word here is “blocked” (i.e. the filters are working and hopefully most of the nasty stuff doesn’t get through).
As usual though, there are some caveats to consider in this data. For example, the malware figure is actually surprisingly low, which is because this gets blocked externally and so the figure is actually an underestimate (probably significantly). Ofcom do not hold any data about what their external provider blocks.
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The regulator also only retains the last 30 days’ worth of data on SPAM emails, which reveals that they blocked 52,725 SPAM messages in February 2026 alone (roughly akin to an estimate of 624,000 per year). But ISPreview also found some older data, which stated that the regulator blocked 190,000 spams in the 30-day period preceding 16th July 2025, so there’s clearly scope for dramatic month-to-month variations.
Meanwhile, Andy Ward, the SVP International of Absolute Security, said the figures underlined the importance of public sector organisations ensuring they had good cyber resilience. “The reality is that almost a fifth of organisations experienced operational disruptions that lasted as long as two weeks, with the majority facing downtime that lasted nearly five days, when hit with a cyber-attack,” added Ward. But thus far we’ve not seen Ofcom suffering any major operational disruptions due to a cyberattack, at least not ones that we’ve known about.
Ofcom’s Email Blocking Stats (Excluding SPAM)
June 2023 – February 2024 (March 2023 – May 2023 is not available/reported)
Total phishing emails blocked: 152221
Total malware emails blocked: 3813March 2024 – February 2025
Total phishing emails blocked: 149032
Total malware emails blocked: 2778March 2025 – February 2026
Total phishing emails blocked: 171683
Total malware emails blocked: 1994
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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