February was a bad month for email. Due to a surge in the month of February, spam now accounts for 90% of email traffic according to Symantec. Two botnets, named Grum and Rustock, helped this spam surge by pushing up spam levels 5.5 percent. The Grum botnet came back from a period of plateau to increase activity by 51%. The rise of both botnet systems were linked to activity related to Canadian pharmaceutical spam.
Country specific:
Spam levels reached 93.4% of all e-email in Italy last month
Denmark was at 92.8%
Russia at 91.8%
US was 90.2%
The US Department of Defense is making a serious effort to improve open-source adoption. It will be issuing new guidelines to make it easier for the department to use open-source software. The department has stated that open-source meets the purchasing requirements set forth by the department and will help them better identify and eliminate threats and become more agile to changing requirements. 