There’s no doubt that social media as emerged as a major conduit through which malware is now be distributed across the Internet. What’s nice to see is that the owners of social networking sites are finally starting to do something about it.

This may strike some security professionals as improbable, but a new report from IBM suggests that overall IT security situation may actually be improving.

According to a recent report from the researchers at Blue Coat Systems nearly two-thirds of that security attacks that IT organizations are likely to see in 2012 will come from known malware networks. In fact, Blue Coat researchers found that out of the 500 malware networks and subnets that it regularly tracks the top five sources are from malware networks with names such as Shnakule, Glomyn, Cavka, Naargo and Cinbric.

Unfortunately, when it comes to mobile security it looks like things might get a lot worse before they get better.

As security increasingly becomes a service delivered via the cloud, the number of endpoints that are unprotected should substantially drop in the months and years ahead.

As security researchers look for patterns to all the various types of attacks that were launched in 2011, there is one glimmer of optimism that should warm the hearts of IT security administrators everywhere.

One of the simplest and most effective attacks many cybercriminals like to rely on is DNS cache poisoning. Because the original Domain Name System (DNS) that powers the Internet wasn’t created with security issues in mind, cybercriminals have found it relatively easy to hijack DNS servers.

IT organizations can take some comfort in the recent arrest of the alleged masterminds behind the one of the largest know cybercriminal networks. But given the nature of cybercrime, it’s only a matter of time before some other organizations emerge to fill the void left by a network that consisted of more than 4,000 bots.