CircleID summarizes the latest McAfee report on spam and malware:

McAfee, Inc. today unveiled its McAfee Threats Report: Third Quarter 2010, which uncovered that average daily malware growth has reached its highest levels, with an average of 60,000 new pieces of malware identified per day, almost quadrupling since 2007. At the same time, spam levels decreased in volume this quarter, both globally and in local geographies. Spam hit a two year low this quarter while malware continued to soar. More than 14 million unique pieces of malware were identified in 2010, one million more than Q3 2009.

It seems counter-intuitive that spam would be declining as malware increases, as spam is the transport network for malware; what’s happening, apparently, as that the more benign forms of spams (the ones that are just trying to sell you something you don’t want but aren’t trying to hijack your computer) are declining, and the remaining spam is more nasty. All the more reason for users to have multiple anti-virus programs and for work on the New Architecture for the Internet to accelerate.