MessageLabs enterprise provider of integrated messaging and online security services has released on 27 July, 2006 its Intelligence Report for July delivering statistics for spam, viruses, phishing. The trends and figures indicate that overall the global level of online threats is stagnant, maintaining a stability tendency compared with June. Mteris show that volume of spam actually decreased 2.1% compared with the passed month to only 62.7%, meaning 1 in 1, 59 e-mails. Viruses however have increased by 0.05% since June growing to a ratio of 1 in every 96.6 e-mails.

"Phishing: July showed an increase of 0.03 percent in the proportion of phishing attacks compared with the previous month; with one in every 459.8 (0.22 percent) of emails being a phishing attack. The number of phishing attacks as a proportion of all email-borne threats also increased by 2 percent, now accounting for 21 percent of all malicious emails intercepted by MessageLabs, compared to the July 2005 figure of 9.6 percent," stated MessageLabs in a press release.

Globally, India is, for the fifth consecutive month, the number one virus victim worldwide, while Belgium is spared with a total of 149.2 viral emails. The statistics also indicate that Israel is the number one destination for spam, with a percentage of 77.3 out of the total number of e-mails, while Australia is in last place in this category with only 48.8% of spammed e-mails.

"With a global increase in the uptake of social networking portals, such as MySpace, we are seeing the bad guys increasingly target these sites, exploiting user-ignorance around this new form of communication and stealing personal information for spamming purposes," said Mark Sunner, chief technology officer, MessageLabs. "Interestingly, we have also seen phishing attacks evolve onto new platforms, such as VoIP, whereby spoof phone calls are made to victims to extract their credit card details. This clearly demonstrates the constant level of innovation by cyber criminals to leverage new modes of Internet level communication and capture a victim's personal identity."