Twitter can be addictive. For some, it’s the perfect mix of an RSS reader, a chat room and a never-ending cocktail party. But for cybercriminals, it’s just another technology to be exploited.

Worms, botnets, phishing scams and malware have already found their way into Twitter. Crooks work night and day, so you know eventually a variation on every nasty trick that found its way into your email inbox or a web-page will show up in a tweet. But with a little common sense and few security precautions, Twitter can be as safe as any social network on the Web — even if Twitter doesn’t think it’s actually social network.

Malware spam is back after a one-month hiatus! The attack has returned to the forefront of the spam threat landscape in the form of .zip and .html attachments, as discussed in the September 2010 State of Spam & Phishing report. Malware spam more than tripled in volume, and .zip attachment spam saw a four-fold increase month-over-month. As such, we reviewed what this attachment spam contained and discussed how those threats pose a serious risk to users. Overall, spam made up 92.51% of all messages in August, compared with 91.89% in July.