Spam: the global ration of spam this month is 64.4 percent, a diminutive decrease of 0.1 percent from August. This is indicative that spam is not going away, and that concentrations are expected to increase again in coming months as spammers continue to adopt new techniques.

Viruses: virus and trojan traffic has been steadily declining since the beginning of the year and in Q3 2006 is much lower than for the same period in 2005. In September, the global ratio of email-borne viruses in email traffic from new and previously unknown bad sources destined for valid recipients was 1 in 89.6 emails (1.12 percent), an increase of 0.1 percent since last month – still a large volume.

Bots: MessageLabs research indicates that bots are increasing in number and distribution, particularly in South American countries, where the use of bots to distribute bank trojans and phishing scams has now escalated to such a degree as to make them the new “419-scam” of the region.

Phishing: September showed a large increase of 0.27 percent in the proportion of phishing attacks compared with the previous month. One in 170 (0.59 percent) emails was some form of phishing attack. When judged as a proportion of all email-borne threats such as viruses and trojans, the number of phishing emails has risen by 21.7 percent, now accounting for 52.4 percent of all the malicious emails intercepted by MessageLabs in September.