Statistics related to spam levels feature prominently in this Internet Threats Trend Report, as they did in the report about the fourth quarter of 2010. This is due to the wide variations observed during the first three months of 2011, and the takedown of the Rustock botnet – which we calculated as responsible for sending around 50 billion spam messages daily. We have also included zombie data which shows the effects of the takedown as well as the huge UPS outbreak at the end of March.

Some highlights from the report:

• Spam levels averaged 149 billion spam/phishing messages per day during Q1, compared to the 142 billion spam/phishing messages per day in Q4 2010 and 198 billion in Q3 2010.
• Approximately 258,000 zombies were activated daily during Q1, a decrease compared to the 288,000 zombies in Q4 2010 and 339,000 during Q3 2010.
• The most popular spam topic in Q1 was again pharmacy ads representing 28% of all spam, down from 42% in Q4 2010.
• India keeps its title for the third quarter in a row as the country with the most zombies – 17% of all zombies worldwide.
• Parked domains were the website category most likely to contain malware.
• Streaming media/downloads continues to be the most popular topic for blog creators in the Web 2.0 sphere of user-generated content, with 21% of the generated content.

A brief SlideShare presentation summarizing the report is available here

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