Postini is the email security and archiving hosted services arm of Google, and they process billions of messages a day — looking for trends in virus and phishing scams alike. So when Google Postini reports that virus activity in Q3 2010 was up 10% year-over-year, it’s worth listening. Here are some details from the Postini report.

The full details of the Google Postini Q3 2010 spam and virus findings can be found here. But the numbers that jumped out: message payload viruses were up 42% in Q3 vs. Q2 of this year, largely due to a huge increase in volume in August – but spam is down 24% year-over-year and 16% from Q2, likely due to a series of botnet shutdowns.

Google wraps up their report by recapping Internet security tips that most people reading this probably already know, like: beware shortened URLs; make sure financial notifications are actually from your bank or brokerage; try not to open attachments even if there’s a provocative subject line about a celebrity.

So while Postini definitely analyzes enough e-mail to talk about movements in message protection, I still wonder – are managed service providers, whether they use Google or not, and whether they use cloud or on-premise, seeing the same general trends in their spam and anti-virus as Postini?

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