Happy New Year! At this time of year, personal and professional resolutions are often made. These resolutions are often broken within a few days, but it is clear that one resolution will not be broken in 2009. Spam levels are slowly creeping back up to their pre-McColo shutdown levels and spammers have come back fighting. You may remember that on November 11, 2008, McColo-hosted systems were shut down based on abuse complaints. As a result, spam volumes dropped dramatically across the world. However, recent statistics indicate that spam volumes have slowly crept back up to 80 percent of their pre-McColo shutdown levels. In recent days, Symantec has also observed that spammers are continuing to piggyback on legitimate newsletters and using the reputation of major social networking sites to try and deliver spam messages into recipients’ inboxes. The social networking spam messages were carefully crafted to closely mimic the legitimate notification emails often distributed from social networking sites. The recent holiday season was also used as a vehicle by spammers to distribute a wide host of spam messages including adult, leisure, finance, and meds spam messages. These spam attacks were not limited to the English language but included non-English language spam too. To read about these or other trends in the Symantec Monthly State of Spam Report, such as spammers using the recession to get into your inbox, new year brings new fraud attacks, and Obama-related spam messages, please visit the State of Spam website and the January State of Spam Report.