Just like Google and Yahoo compete for search dominance, and Iran and Iraq for higher oil reserves, the malware producing field is also much disputed. China, former developer and producer extraordinaire has bent its head in front of Russia, new reigning champ, according to metrics from security software producer PC Tools.

The report, set to be released tomorrow in full, has the former Soviet country accounting for 27.9 percent of all the malware, spyware and other malicious code, while China is slowly regressing to its second position with 26.5 percent. The difference might not be as great as I have led you to believe at first, but remember that the United States usually were runners-up in this infamous race, and it now stands only third, with 9.98 percent.

Malware analyst from PC Tools, Sergei Shevchenko, said that: "The vacuum left by the RBN has been filled by other malware distributors. The bottom line is that there are more viruses and spyware coming out of Russia now than ever before and the complexity of this malware is also increasing."

There are bigger problems when fighting the malware producers nowadays, than there were before RBN was in power. "Now we are seeing Russian malware hosting services being advertised for servers in Malaysia, China, Panama, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey and India," Shevchenko pointed out. As history taught us, it's easier to fight the enemy you see, even if it is only a mockup. Conspiracists even say that the whole war on terrorism is actually smoke blown in our faces to distract us from the tensions really going on and lead us to believe that the human rights-removing laws being passed are actually beneficial, but I digress.

The top 10 malware producing countries and percentages they account for are:

Russia - 27.89 per cent
China - 26.52 per cent
United States - 9.98 per cent
Brazil - 6.77 per cent
Ukraine - 5.45 per cent
United Kingdom - 5.34 per cent
France - 3.81 per cent
Germany - 2.14 per cent
Sweden - 1.6 per cent
Spain - 1.37 per cent