IBM X-Force Report 2007 findings in Spam and Web Content

The prestigious IBM Internet Security Systems X-Force published their annual report for 2007, entitled "IBM X-Force 2007 Trend Statistics Report", concerned with the statistics of the threats and attacks to computers security all over the world. Their main findings about spam and web content are:

Spam and Phishing

• For the first time ever, spam message size decreased sharply to pre-2005 levels, corresponding with the decrease observed in image-based spam distribution.
• While image-based spam decreased in 2007, X-Force monitored short-lived attempts to use PDF and MP3 attachments in spam messages-new techniques for 2007.
• Of the top 20 companies targeted by phishing in 2007, 19 are in the banking industry and one conducts recruiting.

Web Content

• 9 percent of Internet content was classified as unwanted (criminal, pornography, etc) as compared to 12.5 percent in 2006.
• The U. S. far outpaces other countries as the primary hosting source of adult, socially deviant and criminal content on the Internet, accounting for roughly 40-48 percent in each content category.
• The U. S. and Germany were the only two countries consistently among the top three hosting sources for each type of "unwanted" Internet content monitored throughout 2007.

The actual distribution of unwanted Web content, focus of much of my research, is the following one:

As expected, most is pornography, but beware: the 0.273% of a hundred billion pages is a lot.