The Storm botnet has caused serious problems for both security companies and users around the world because it appeared in lots of variants which attempted to trick security software and bypass protection. However, according to a new report published by MessageLabs, the Storm loses more and more ground to other threats. For example, the web-based malware has been increased with 23.3 percent while the Storm, which previously infected approximately 2 million computers, has "only" 100,000 victims. MessageLabs explains the botnet suffered a 57 percent decrease which could be only good news for us.

"April was a month of unpredictability with the mighty Storm botnet losing all but five percent of its anonymous army and web-based malware reaching new levels," said Mark Sunner, Chief Security Analyst, MessageLabs. "This month we find ourselves fighting the cybercrime battle on many fronts, with the bad guys using an arsenal of weapons in order to detonate spam, viruses, phishing attacks and targeted Trojans, making it more important than ever to have a strong security shield in place."

Getting back to the web-based malware, the stats are not looking too good. According to MessageLabs, 36.1 percent of the total web-based malware spotted in April was represented by new threats, compared with 23.3 percent in March. New threats are nothing else than dangerous threats because, they are could infiltrate into vulnerable computers easier than older threats which are already blocked by security products.

Unfortunately, spam messages seem to remain one of the main problems of today's email communications because no less than 1 in 1.36 email is identified as unsolicited traffic. No less than 73.5 percent of the total email traffic is actually spam which, according to MessageLabs, is a decrease of 0.13 points compared with March.