The reports are in and the news is not good. Malicious spam rose sharply in the third quarter. From July to September 2008, one in every 416 emails was malicious spam - compared to one in every 3,333 emails in the second quarter of the year. The rise is blamed on several large attacks such as the “Penguin Panic” attack. What was made to look like an innocent game for the iPhone was actually a nasty Trojan. This attack was responsible for nearly 27% of malicious spam. A similar attack pretending to be a Microsoft security patch was second, accounting for 12% of malicious spam sent.

The third quarter reports also found that the U.S. leads the “Dirty Dozen” of top spam producing companies, with nearly 19% all spam coming from them. The other countries on the list are Russia, China, Turkey, Brazil, South Korea, India, Argentina, Italy, the UK, and two new countries to the list, Columbia and Thailand.

Experts believe malicious spam will continue to rise and that the use of social networking sites to deliver malware will also continue to rise as spammers and cybercriminals continue to look for cheaper and more effective ways to do their dirty work.