According to a CommTouch quarterly Internet Threats Trend Report, spammers prefer sending their unsolicited mails through compromised accounts than botnets. This strategy shift is most likely driven by high-profile botnets being taken down one by one, consequently dropping spam levels over the last few months.

“Spammers are trying to out-maneuver IP-based spam blocking techniques as well as law enforcement that have both effectively targeted botnets,” said Amir Lev, Commtouch’s chief technology officer. “They are now using a combination of malware and phishing to compromise legitimate accounts and then using these accounts to send low-volume spam outbreaks.”

It’s not just e-mail. Cyber attackers swarm where many people fritter their precious time, with Facebook being an epic example. A multitude of malware plagues the social network including one that says it’ll reveal who’s viewing your profile if you click on the “view my profile” link or one that claims to show the dead body of Osama Bin Laden. Spammers tend to take advantage of fads and social trends, such as using Casey Anthony and video chat as the most recent bait.

Several other forms of malware that occurred before include:

— Phony IRS “rejected payment” emails,
— Fake iPhone 5 notifications,
— SEO poisoning,
— Malicious scripts within Adobe PDF files.

Additional highlights from the July 2011 Trend Report include:

— Spam levels averaged 113 billion spam/phishing messages per day during Q2, the lowest in three years;
— Approximately 377,000 zombies were activated daily during Q2, a significant increase compared to the 258,000 zombies in Q1;
— The most popular spam topic in Q2 was pharmacy ads, although these now represent only 24% of all spam, down from 28% in Q1;
— India keeps its title as the country with the most zombies: 17% of all zombies worldwide;
— Websites featuring pornography and sexually explicit material were the most likely to contain malware.

Apart from malware and third-party spammers, Google+ ran out of storage space over the weekend for its notification tracking system. The beta social network accidentally re-sent notification messages repeatedly, which technically is spamming. Vic Gundotra, Google SVP of social apologized for the incident.

“For about 80 minutes we ran out of disk space on the service that keeps track of notifications,” he wrote in a Google+ post. “Hence our system continued to try sending notifications. Over, and over again. Yikes. We didn’t expect to hit these high thresholds so quickly, but we should have.”