It has been a big year for the internet with social networks continuing to grow at an amazing pace, search engines scrambling to keep pace with user demand for fresh news, and as always spam and malware causing havoc around the world.

A look at the year’s major spam event shows some consistent trends.

• Season spam such as Valentine’s Day and Christmas remains predictable
• Spammers quickly move to exploit any major global news events such as celebrity deaths and wars
• Spam networks are becoming more distributed and resistant to shutdown attempts
• Social networking spam is on the rise as spammers attempt to exploit the perceived trust between people and their online “friends”
• Human error continues to be a big part of the spam landscape, both through inadvertent data exposure and through people falling victim to social engineering

Here is a look at some of these major events throughout the year.

January

Scams promising free money from US government grants attempts to exploit the news of corporate bailouts and the increase in unemployment.

Fake CCN news alerts take advantage of a clash between Israel and Hamas.

Global spam volume begin returning to normal levels after the McColo shutdown of November 2008.

The inauguration of US President Barack Obama leads to a wave of spam spreading rumours that his inauguration is invalid or that he resigned and attempts to trick users in downloading malware.

Spammers also get a head start on Valentine’s Day with malware-carrying love letters.

February

Human error at Google marked the entire internet unsafe (is it really that far from the truth?).

The poor economy continues to cause unemployment to increase, leading to a new wave of fake job spam.

Microsoft offeres a $250,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the Conficker worm creators.

March

Citibank falls for a Nigerian 419 scam to the tune of $27 million, but is saved when the transfers fail due to invalid account numbers provided by the scammers.

The BBC gets itself into hot water when it buys a botnet to research a story and then uses it to send messages to potential victims.

April

Security vendor PGP exposes hundreds of customer email addresses by not using the BCC field for a broadcast email.

Global spam volume makes a complete return to the level it was at prior to the McColo shutdown.

Researchers discover the first ever SMS virus in the wild, capable of spreading between mobile phones via text messages.

Twitter suffers its first major malware outbreak due to a cross-site scripting attack by a bored teenager.

May

The Swine Flu outbreak gives spammers a new hot topic to exploit in their latest scams, with fake drugs and “survival guides” offers flooding mailboxes.

The Cutwail botnet, previously seen during the Valentine’s Day spam season, makes a fresh start pushing fake weight loss products, and Acai Berry scams appear all over the internet.

June

Air France flight 446 crashed in the Atlantic ocean, giving spammer a new tragedy to exploit.

A UK furniture company makes a major PR blunder by using Twitter hashtags for the Iranian conflict to promote their products.

Michael Jackson dies, nearly causing an internet meltdown as search engines, social networks and news websites struggled to copy with the unprecedented burst in traffic.  Spammers quickly jumped on the public thirst for details about Jackson’s death with new spam messages.

July

The ZBot Trojan appears in a new attack that uses a fake Microsoft update notice to trick users.

A botnet launches a major DDoS attack against US government websites to coincide with the July 4^th holiday.

Spammers begin using free URL shortening services to bypass spam filters.

August

Another Twitter phishing/spam combo attack appears causing disruption for users.

Twitter, Facebook and other sites were all knocked offline for several hours due to a targeted DDoS attack against a pro-Georgian blogger.  The event was so prominent in the news that spammers began exploiting it with email and search engine keyword spam to cause further denial of service and compromise more computers.

Another spammer ISP is shutdown but this time the effect is nowhere near as successful as when McColo was taken offline, suggesting spammers are building more resilience into their networks.

September

A South Australian woman shares her experience of being the victim of identity theft when her Facebook account is hacked and used to scam money from her friends.

Popular blogging software WordPress becomes the target of a new worm that attempts to insert spam links in thousands of blogs.

A new Koobface worm variant appears targeting Facebook users.

October

A court order leads to an innocent Gmail user losing their email account when Google is forced to close it down.  The court order was granted after a bank employee accidentally emails customer information to the Gmail account.

A list of over 50,000 email addresses and passwords for major online web and email services appears on the internet.

A thriving marketplace of open source malware is uncovered by security researchers.

Geocities shuts down, taking with it thousands of spammer’s websites.

Facebook wins a massive $711 million judgement again one of the world’s biggest spammers.

November

The first Christmas season spam starts to appear to exploit the rising trend in online shopping.

Researchers successfully kill the Mega-D botnet.

Twitter job spam starts appearing promoting “get rich quick” schemes to exploit high unemployment rates.

An Australian amateur programmer writes an iPhone virus that causes relatively harmless infection on jailbroken iPhones.  His code is quickly repurposed by people with more malicious intent, and a security vendor is criticized by the wider community for rewarding him by offering him a job.

December

A New Zealand man is fined $15 million by the US FTC for operating a worldwide spam gang.  The same man faces charges in Australia soon after.

The Koobface worm adds a Christmas theme to its Facebook phishing attempts.