New botnets are reportedly causing more havoc on the Internet, with botnets now responsible for sending 87.9 percent of all spam, including one of the oldest and largest botnets which has doubled in size in just four months.

Australia has dropped like a stone from its number one spot as the country receiving the most virus-infected emails to number 12 in the world, but our level of spam activity is still above the global average despite Australian spam activity decreasing by two percent this month.

According to Marshal8e6's TRACElabs weekly spam volumes have broken the record set in July 2008, and have risen 60 percent since the start of 2008 with spammers having learnt how to minimise disruptions to their operations caused by the shutting down of one of their major botnets.

Readers of the Linux section on popular Web 2.0 social networking site Reddit discovered a Twitter bot was tweeting stories listed on the site without attribution. As punishment Redditers decided to turn the bot into their puppet, mouthing whatever they commanded.

There’s been a huge rise in the use of shortened URLs by spammers which poses a greater security threat to Internet users, including those accessing popular social network sites like Twitter.

Spam levels remain at 90 percent, according to security provider Symantec. But the situation would have worsened if a major botnet hadn't suffered downtime during June.

Spam levels climbed to nearly 90 percent of all email last month with some worrying new trends emerging, like the booming Twitter site being used as bait to phish for information.

If you want to keep the spambots out of Gmail then you might want to try a bit of upside down thinking.

That devil of a Conficker worm that’s never far from the surface these days is likely to cause a significant increase in spam levels over the next three months, according to a report by yet another security firm that’s closely monitoring the worm’s exploits.

Could the speculation surrounding the Conficker payload be coming to an end as the latest variant of the virulent worm reveals its hand in the form of links to the Waledac malware family and talk of rogue antivirus installations?