A chart from MessageLabs illustrating a big decline in the volume of spam emails (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — According to reports posted last week on the MessageLabs Intelligence blog, operated by the Symantec ( www.symantec.com ) unit, the organization’s scanning has seen a rise in malicious attachments accompanying spam email The post on the MessageLabs blog says that while spam email traffic in general fell dramatically, as expected, following the shutdown of the massive Rustock botnet in March, the company’s spam traps saw a big increase in the volume of spam data hitting its spam traps , in spite of the declining number of emails. The reason turned out to be an increase in the number of emails with .zip file attachments being sent out by the Cutwail botnet, meaning a big increase in the average size of each email, in terms of data. That volume of spam data has been fairly well sustained since March 26, which suggests a bit of a shift in spamming tactics.

A graph from MessageLabs shows spam trends by month (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) – Security firm Symantec ( www.symantec.com ) has released its January 2011 MessageLabs Intelligence Report that reveals spam is responsible for 78.6 percent of all email traffic. According to the report released Tuesday, the volume of spam in circulation in January 2011 was 65.9 percent lower than that same period a year ago, when the spam rate was 83.9 percent of all email traffic

Zymic, an American Web-hosting service, on Thursday removed a website published in recent days which listed the names, photos, addresses, identity numbers and positions of hundreds of IDF soldiers and commanders accused by the site’s anonymous author of being “Israeli war criminals” during Operation Cast Lead. Although a number of soldiers who were listed said on Thursday that they were proud to be on the site, its appearance raised new questions about holes in security surrounding sensitive IDF information. RELATED: Website revealing Cast Lead ‘war criminals’ removed IDF investigates 400 complaints over Cast Lead conduct Amnesty calls on ICC to act on Cast Lead ‘war crimes’ Ben-Ari asks UN to probe US for war crimes The list even included personal information on outgoing IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen

Cloud computing underwhelms PHP developers While technology vendors continue to pound home the message of cloud computing, PHP developers Tuesday viewed the concept as overhyped and were not in agreement on its benefits. Developers at the ZendCon 2010 PHP conference in Santa, Clara, Calif., heard Zend Technologies CEO Andi Gutmans tout the company’s cloud computing plans, which involve developing Zend PHP Cloud Platform

This graph from the latest MessageLabs Intelligence Report shows the growth of targeted attacks.

Outgunned: How Security Tech Is Failing Us Information security professionals face mounting threats, hoping some mix of technology, education, and hard work will keep their companies and organizations safe. But lately, the specter of failure is looming larger.

Web Hosting News – RUTHERFORD, N.J. –  MessageWire, and its sister company Solar VPS, are making Open-Xchange business-class open source e-mail and collaboration software available to their customers and partners as a less expensive alternative to the established Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint offering