Security statistics have demonstrated that virus presence is diminishing throughout all segments of the Internet, as malicious software such as Trojan worms is on the rise in the first half of 2006. Compared to last year, viral infection via e-mails is considerably less frequent, dropping from one out of 35 infected e-mails in 2005, to only one in 91 e-mails nowadays.

In this regard, BlackSpider security company has issued a warning telling of a necessity in evolving online security policies, in order to suit an ever changing and heterogeneous malware environment. It seems that attackers will focus their efforts on hosting viruses on web pages rather than spreading them via e-mail attachments. The shift the BlackSpider warns about is the inevitable move toward exploiting the range of vulnerabilities of the web browsers combined with those brought on by adjacent technologies such as flash, or ActiveX components.

The context is ripe for creating specially crafted web pages that host a variety of malware and indexing them as high as possible in search engine rankings, in order to attract unsuspected visitors, and take advantage of security holes.

In June, the number of e-mails containing viruses are down to an all time record of just 0.68 percent of all e-mail traffic, with spam volume also on the decline, which is, in the end, the result of implementing more reliable security solutions. This is the reason for the threats' shift to web pages, filtering technology for this area being scarce and in need of policy change.