It seems security is the talk of the town, no thanks to rapid cloud expansion, a mobile frontier waiting to be broken in, and Wikileaks scandals bringing the topic front and center.  The headlines make great fodder for security companies sniffing out an opportunity for self-promotion, spouting stats addressing these rising security issues.

The latest is from security vendor Symantec, which released its MessageLabs Intelligence Report for Jan 2011. The report indicates a dramatic decline in spam levels throughout the last two weeks, with spam accounting for just 78.6 percent of all emails – the lowest rate since March 2009. This rate is 65.9% lower than for the same period last year.

“Since January 10, all three botnets have resumed their spam-sending operations but not at their previous levels. Since its return, Rustock, previously the single largest spam-sending botnet, is now responsible for 17.5 percent of all spam in January.”

Botnets were responsible for as much as 88% of all spam sent last year. While spam levels had significantly decreased this month, Rustock, Lethic and Xarvester are back to work and are reportedly not “disrupted in any way either by law enforcement or through other action”. In turn, South Africa remains the most targeted by email-borne malware, the Automative is still the most spammed industry sector and 44.1 percent of malicious domains blocked this month were new ones.

Commtouch is also releasing statistical spam updates every now and then, including the most recent report from earlier this month, where the company reported a sudden spike of activity, indicating spammers were back from the holidays.  And in other related security news, we recently discussed the hacking of popular mobile app Trapster, and the findings announced at the Black Hat DC Conference, where researches uncovered a new way of attacking laptops and smartphones.

Going back to botnets, Bagle  has replaced Rustock as the single biggest source of email spam accounting for 47.5 percent of all spam. In turn, The German government is demanding Facebook to stop spamming individuals after a user utilized the Friend Finder feature. Google is also taking action against “search spam,” according to Principal Engineer Matt Cutts.