This month, McAfee have come out with an interesting report on the Online Security Threats. It is an interesting read for anybody interested in the security aspects.

There seems to be nothing exceptionally different from popular wisdom, but there are some interesting facts and figures worth reading. A few highlights, which caught my attention are following.

Global Recession in spamming Trends: The overall spamming activity has drastically reduced in last two quarters. Seems like global recession has affected the spamming industry as well. For the first time in last several quarters, spam as a percentage of total emails sent, has come down below 90%.

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But actually, it is the result of the shut down of one of the major spamming network with the name McColo in last November. Let’s see how things progress in remaining quarters of 2009.

Distributing Rogue Applications seems the New Fad:

There is a tremendous jump in the activities of Rogue applications. This seems to be the new area, where money is being minted today.

March saw an unprecedented growth the launch of new rogue applications and witnessed more than double number of such applications as compared to any single month in last many years.

Which Country Hosts the most BAD URLs:

Many people accuse countries like, China, Russia, Ukrain and other East European countries to be the root of evil, where most of the malware are fabricated and nurtured.

But contrary to popular beleif, US accounts for almost half of all the BAD URL hosting. This may be due to the popularity of Internet in US, but it is high time that we stop accusing of other countries for all bad things.

Drugs Continues to be the Top Reason behind Spam:

Male enhancement, prescription drug, and general advertising spam continue to score near the top among the types of spam sent. These three types alone account for approximately 60 percent of the spam sent during the past three quarters

You can download and read the complete report here.