Spam down 10 fold since last summer, says Cisco

But Cisco report finds threats to smartphone users are proliferating

Spam has reduced ten fold from 300 billion instances last summer to 30 billion instances currently, according to Cisco's latest threat report.

There have been a number of factors influencing this reduction including the closure of Affiliate programme SpamIt.com, which shut down under the threat of legal action. Once this group, a financial centre enabling spam, had been dismantled, volumes of spam began dropping considerably.

In addition, several botnets were taken down in the second half of 2010, including Bredolab, which was run out of Armenia, and was part of a support infrastructure selling infected machines to spammers.

Henry Stern, security researcher for Cisco, said: "This is a very positive thing as spam is an indicator of computer infection, and so computer infection has been significantly reduced."

Cisco has also given several awards as part of its threat report. Its 'Outstanding contribution to the fight against cyber crime' award went to Thorsten Holz, researcher from the University of Bochum in Germany, who was responsible for taking out a big botnet.

An award for the biggest new threat was given to Stuxnet, a worm that has spread the cyber danger from the PC into the physical world via computerised mechanisms within industrial apparatus.

Continued concerns surround actions around money laundering, which originally saw cyber criminals from the Ukraine and Maldova in particular attack industries within the US. These operations have recently expanded to France and Spain.

The biggest threat for 2011 surrounds the growth in attacks on smartphones.

There have been attacks on iPhones, where hackers have unlocked related web sites exposing a vulnerability in Adobe reader, thus opening up the possibility of "dryside" downloads from the smartphone platform.

A new attack called ‘Man in the Mobile' also emerged last year, which saw an information-stealing trojan attach to a phone's web browser, steal banking credentials or, using an additional component, intercept messages from the bank and steal money that way.

Finally there were rogue apps found in the Android app store.

On the positive side, however, social networking attacks are less successful than they were last year, with increased consumer awareness around privacy concerns, and more effective security teams within the IT department.