According to Symantec, an anti-virus developer situated in the USA, almost one-half million PCs, which are infected with viruses or targeted with spam and phishing, are in the minimum as many bots belonging to so-called botnets that cyber-criminals remotely regulate, amongst which numerous belong to Germany. Spiegel Online published this in news on April 5, 2011.

The air-force center of The Netherlands had its Internet connection down over a period of 3 days during the end-week of March 2011 because a botnet malware had hit unexpectedly. States a source, the malware helped get the PCs at the Gilze-Rijen center recruited to the Rustock network of bots that was taken down during March-end 2011. Radio Netherlands Worldwide reported this in news on April 1, 2011.

According to Australia situated Westpac Bank, fake e-mails are doing the rounds while posing as messages from the financial institution as well as displaying a malevolent web-link, reported Techworld.com.au on April 4, 2011.

The EMC security division RSA has disclosed that a data-breach, which occurred against the company during the middle of March 2011, was due to one spear phishing assault wherein attackers abused vulnerability in Adobe Flash, which wasn't yet patched. Computerweekly.com reported this on April 4, 2011.