ANTenna Blog -- Security

Spam is down, and so are zombies, but guards have to stay up -- new types of attacks are picking up the slack, and picking it up in particularly nasty ways, according to a quarterly report from Secure Computing. Just because old threats appear to be diminishing, doesn't mean they're going away. In fact, they're being blended into more dangerous threats than ever.

The Secure Computing Q2 Internet Threat Report has good news, bad news and scary news.

First the good: while spam is up a whopping 280 percent since last year, spam volumes have actually decreased since early spring, and are down 40 percent since March.

Zombies are down, too, with about 150,000 new zombies detected daily, half of last year's 300,000 zombies-a-day level, as measured by Secure Computing.

The bad: 16 percent of all spam is homegrown, originating in the United States; that's double the rate of the nearest competitor, Russia.

The ugly: blended threats using a variety of techniques and approaches are on the rise, with malicious and compromised Web sites an e-mail security vulnerabilities working together to overcome your defenses.

It gets a bit uglier when you take into consideration in the pop culture factor: Olympic news, election reports, celebrity scandals (and promises of compromising pictures) all being used to bad effect by cybercrooks looking for new ways to ply their bad old trades.

Considering how pop-cult heavy the second half of this year is, starting with the Olympics now in progress, this one's likely to get uglier still.

The solution for small and midsize businesses? Raise your guards higher than ever, patch everything that can be patched, warn your employees to raise their guards, and get to work preparing blended, thorough and comprehensive defensive strategies -- and putting those strategies in place.

Download the complete Secure Computing Q2 Threat Report here.