Symantec rolls out December State of Spam Report with reviews of past month’s key trends and analysis. As company claims, monitoring over 450 million inboxes worldwide observed 72% spam emails in overall email traffic. Most of those mails were from spammers from guessed email addresses. Also, as end of the year approaches, there are increase in holiday gift scams, fake lottery, infected snowball images and always present replica products. Spammers were also on the hunt for new email addresses, initiating a massive harvesting campaign. For more trends and analyses read the December State of Spam Report.

America Online continues to have problems securing its AIM instant messaging service. After spending last few months struggling to develop a comprehensive fix for a bug that exposed fully patched versions of AIM to a nasty worm attack, last week company shipped a silent, server-level patch to fix a gaping hole that allowed hackers to gain complete control of any PC running the latest version of AIM. Obviously AIM 6.5 client remains vulnerable to the same fundamental weakness, potentially allowing malicious hackers to create a worm that infects thousands of users in a matter of hours.

Officials from Internet phone company Skype waited one whole month to publicly release security patch that will remove vulnerability that allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable installations of Skype. User interaction is required to exploit this vulnerability in that the target must visit a malicious page. The vulnerability was patched in the public release of Skype 3.6 for Windows meaning that all versions of Skype for Windows updated or installed as of November 15 include the patch. It is strongly recommended to upgrade your Skype to the latest version.

Microsoft releases important updates for this month. On the list are tree critical and four important updates we should take care of. All of them involve applications including Internet Explorer, DirectX, DirectShow, and Windows Media Format Runtime. Five of these updates could allow remote code execution and another two allows an elevation of privileges. Read more details on Microsoft’s Security Bulletin.