GURGAON, INDIA: Secure Computing Corp has published the company's Q2 Internet threat report containing data and analysis from the Secure Computing research team.

The report shows that while spam volume and new zombies have decreased in the past quarter, enterprises and home users are increasingly being attacked through malicious web content and blended security attacks.

The report states that even though the overall spam volume is up 280 percent from Q2 2007 to Q2 2008, spam volumes have decreased by 40 percent this quarter. In addition, Q2 of 2007 witnessed over 3,00,000 new zombies per day, and during the second quarter of 2008, Secure saw half that amount.

Even though both spam and new zombies are down this year, the researchers point to other areas that are increasingly problematic, including:

 -Over 16 percent of all spam originates from the US, more than twice the amount from Russia

-Male enhancement, product replica and prescription drug spam hold the top three places of types of spam, proving that users can't beat the oldies but goodies

-Swizzor, a rapidly growing ad/spyware family, now makes up more than 30 percent of all new malware in Q2 of 2008

-The ZBot spyware family is another such ad/spyware family that has grown significantly this quarter. ZBot steals users' sensitive data while establishing a backdoor on infected computers to give the attackers full control over compromised systems

-50 percent of all websites are now published in languages other than English

“We are witnessing change every single day in how cyber criminals are developing new vectors of attack through spam, malicious web content, spyware and botnet deployments,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, Director—Intelligence Analysis, Secure Computing. “Through our advanced TrustedSource global reputation system and our research team's ability to analyze and classify terabytes of e-mail, web and network traffic in real-time, we are in an excellent position to identify new trends and protect our customers from new insidious threats.”