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Acronis is trying to make things easier for SMBs to make backups of their VMs, announcing v6.0 of their vmProtect, which is actually a new product. In our story on VM backup technologies earlier this summer, we mentioned several different vendors and their solutions. Despite this collection of products, more than 40 percent of SMBs in the US are NOT backing up their virtual servers, according to the Acronis Disaster Recovery Index.

A new study from research firm Forrester shows that consumer attitudes towards Internet security are significantly changing. Consumers are now more aware of cyber security and are taking more steps to protect themselves on the Web. At the same time, consumers are gravitating to a select group of security vendors with freeware products dominating the industry.

Forrester used data from its Technographics survey over 16 major world markets to note that users are indeed more savvy about the threats to their computers and what they can do about it. The benefactors are the major players in security, most of which have been operating since the mid-1990s, when the first criminal hacker scare and spam started to weed into the mind share of the Internet populace. Norton, AVG, McAfee were the leaders then and are the leaders now. Yet, the vendors are seeing a lot more churn, with consumers dividing brand loyalty among several different products and suites from the major vendors. Have you become more cognizant of Web security in the last couple of years? What kind of products are you using to protect yourself on the Internet?

We have written earlier this summer about the need for two-factor authentication solutions in the wake of various hacking scandals with compromised account sign-ons. A new solution from Confident Technologies called Multifactor Authentication is now available that makes two-factor as easy as clicking on a sequence of images on your smartphone. For those of us that are numerically challenged, it is an intriguing idea.

By now the use of phones as the second factor in a security solution is well known and there are any number of vendors operating in this space. Even Google and Facebook have added this to their services, as we wrote about earlier this summer.

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.

The recent security breach at Citibank, coupled with even RSA hiring what may be its first Chief Security Officer Edward Schwartz, point out that you can never be too paranoid about your personal and corporate data security. RSA was in the news earlier this year for an attach on its SecurID two-factor tokens, something that had been considered the ultimate in enterprise security.

It might be time to take another look at two-factor authentication, and see if it makes sense to implement this in your organization. Here are three basic steps to get started:

We've written before about how some companies like to keep IEv6 browsers around, whether it is to frustrate them intentionally so they can't really surf or because they have real needs for internal apps that were written back in the dark ages.

But let's say that you really want to support IEv6 and want a solution that you can manage centrally. There are a bunch of products available, including one that we have already covered: UniBrows.

The Symantec Vision Conference is where we are spending our time today, starting with the keynote address by Enrique Salem, president and chief executive officer.

Major themes we expect to hear about include mobile security, the cloud backup question and the next fit with virtualization.

Let's get started.

The total volume of spam hitting our collective inboxes continues to decline. According to the latest data from Symantec, the global spam volume in October declined by 22% month-over-month and over 47% since August. This reduction can be attributed to the shutdown of major spam networks like spamit.com and the Bredolab botnet. Even with this decline, though, spam still made up 86.6% of all emails in October. This is the lowest number Symantec has reported since September 2009.