By Winston Chai

CYBERTHREATS such as computer viruses and spam continued their relentless assault over the past 12 months - but the sliver lining is that they were less of a scourge in Singapore.

According to an annual report from MessageLabs, a unit of security software giant Symantec, the 2009 spam rate for Singapore was 85 per cent.

While most of the messages flooding local inboxes are still classified as unsolicited e-mails, the figure is marginally better than the 2009 global spam rate of 87.7 per cent, the report revealed. This year's worldwide average is 6.5 per cent higher than 2008.

The bane of spam was most felt in Norway, China, France, Hong Kong and Denmark - these countries have spam rates ranging from 86.2 per cent to 88.2 per cent.

The global recession was the common theme behind a large dose of unsolicited e-mails promising get-rich-quick schemes and new credit lines. Other events that spammers tried to cash in on this year included the H1N1 pandemic and the deaths of celebrities Michael Jackson and Patrick Swayze, the report said.

Besides the lower spam count, the number of e-mail-borne computer viruses was also lower in Singapore this year. The report said that one in 365.5 e-mails in Singapore were found to be infected - a score considerably better than the global average of one in 286.4.

Luxembourg and China fared the worst in this category - one in 112.2 and one in 173.3 e-mails in these countries were found to be carrying computer viruses.

'We stopped more than 21 million different types of spam campaigns in 2009, more than twice the amount seen in 2008, and saw a 23 per cent increase in malware variants year-on-year,' said Paul Wood, senior analyst with Symantec's MessageLabs Intelligence unit.

'The significant increases suggest that, thanks to the increased availability of specialised criminal toolkits, it was easier to create, distribute and use spam and malware than ever before.'

Botnets, or armies of infected computers controlled by malicious hackers, continued to be the main culprits behind the spam and virus scourge. These compromised machines churned out 83.4 per cent of the 107 billion unsolicited e-mails that are sent around the world on a daily basis.

The heavyweight botnets, which include Cutwail, Rustock and Mega-D, now control more than five million infected computers. In particular, MessageLabs said that Cutwail was a 'dominating force across both spam and malware' this year - it spewed out 29 per cent of all spam or some 8,500 billion unsolicited e-mails between April and November 2009.

'The global financial crisis presented spammers and fraudsters with huge opportunities for social engineering scams and enabled them to prey on the naive and more vulnerable members of society,' MassageLabs said. 'World events, festivities and news stories also provided a rich backdrop from which the spammers and cyber criminals could adapt their themes throughout the year.'

This article was first published in The Business Times.