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In case you hadn't noticed, spam and phishing attacks through the social networks has been on the rise. Security company Symantec released a report yesterday detailing socially-engineered attacks to determine where they are coming from and what techniques malware criminals are using to lure victims into their traps.

One of the most interesting trends that Symantec has noticed is that social spam and phishing has been cyclical, moving from network to network (see above graph). For instance, attacks will focus on Facebook for a period of time before falling off, then focus on Twitter or YouTube before coming back to Facebook. In the cat-and-mouse game that is malware verse security, these trends make sense as exploits are closed on one network and found another.

A new report of security company Symantec says that global spam is at its lowest levels since 2008. The geographic center of spammed accounts has also shifted from Russia to Saudi Arabia. Worldwide spam is now down to one in every 1.37 emails. In the United States, spam accounts for 73.7% of all emails.

Spam levels are now the lowest they have been since McColo, a California-based ISP spam control center, was taken down in 2008. That is, in part, due to the shutdown of the spam-sending botnet Rustock in March 2011. Spam, phishing, viruses and other types of malware are all still major problems in the Internet ecosystem but it looks like progress is being made against the botnets and those that control them.

Spammers are using Facebook Events to trick users into completing online surveys, taking part in online contests and perform other tasks which allow spammers to generate commissions. In some cases, users are also tricked into giving up their mobile phone number, which is then automatically signed up for expensive premium services.

According to multiple security firms, spammers using Facebook Events to promote their links have been highly successful in their efforts to dupe unsuspecting users thus far. According to a report from TrendMicro,"tens of thousands" of users had mistakenly registered for one spammer's event. Meanwhile, Sophos found an example where over 10 million Facebook users had been targeted, and over 165,000 had accepted.

Recent changes to Google's search algorithm have sought to reduce the rankings of what Google has described as "low quality" and "low value add" sites. And while some of these websites have seen a significant drop in traffic, we may find that content farms aren't eradicated. Rather, they're relocating. Impact Media's Mike Essex suggests their new destination may be e-books.

On the Internet, many content farms are full of unoriginal content, often scraped from other sites, and republished under different headlines. The advent of easy self-publishing makes it incredibly simple for this process to be replicated in e-books.

Google has been under increasing pressure in recent months to improve its search results. From accusations of SEO gaming by big sites to a search results page dominated by the likes of Demand Media and other content farms, the search engine has repeatedly heard the cry that it was becoming less and less relevant. Most recently, the company launched an extension to allow users to block results from certain domains.

Today, Google announced that it had made a "big algorithmic improvement" that, unlike other changes, could be noticeable to its users.

Yesterday, Google released a Chrome browser extension that lets users block certain websites from showing up in their Google search results. That way, if you never want to see an eHow article again, you don't have to. Kynetx, a company that offers developers a single platform for building extensions for multiple browsers, saw the announcement and immediately offered $500 to the first person that could create an extension "with the same functionality for all 3 browsers and all 3 major search engines."

Less than a day later, the company has announced a winner and released the extensions.

Are you tired of eHow articles dominating your Google searches? Sick of that same site showing up every time you search for something? Had enough with Yahoo Answers and the inane, unending drivel it seems to drum up from the dregs of the Internet?

The Google Web search team has launched a Chrome browser extension today that will likely become your best friend then. The extension lets you block search results from showing up, meaning you never have to trudge through the murky depths of content farms again.

"Mollom is one of those cool SaaS companies every developer dreams of creating when they wrack their brains looking for a viable software-as-a-service startup," writes Todd Hoff. Mollom is a spam killing SaaS that competes with services like Akismet and Recaptcha by combining both machine learning and captchas (we've covered before here when the company was a ReadWriteWeb sponsor).

Mollom runs on just two geographically distributed servers, both running a Java application server and Cassandra. And those two servers handle 100 API calls a second for companies like Warner Brothers, Fox News and The Economist. Hoff was so impressed by the service, and the fact that it runs on only two servers, that he decided to interview the developers behind the project.

Large quantities of low quality content, of marginal relevance, intended to draw visitors through search, but drive them to click through ads to other sites - that's what's called a content farm. The voices of critics of Google are getting louder with allegations that the world's leading search engine has been thoroughly gamed and is now drowning in content farmed links. Content farm is a very subjective designation, though.

Search startup Blekko is betting that web users want to search without seeing results from companies that are pumping out low-quality content just for the ad revenue. But is one person's low quality content another person's more-accessible reading material? Today Blekko released a list of the top 20 domains that its users have clicked the "SPAM" button on in their search results. Content from those sites will never show up in a Blekko search again, the company says. What do you think of this list?

Last October, Facebook filed three lawsuits in a federal court in San Jose, California alleging that three individuals were "attempting to trick people on Facebook into signing up for mobile subscriptions and sending spam to their friends."

According to an update on Facebook's Security Blog, the decision came this week, kicking the offender off the site and awarding Facebook with more than $360 million in damages.