According to the report, 'Replica Products' category stood second in the spam types with around 7% of the total spam. This type of spam offers fake imitations of prestigious watches, brands and other accessories like purses, bags, shades and jewelry.

In the context of phishing during H1-2010, BitDefender states that the most preferred targets of cyber criminals were the financial organizations, comprising more than 70% of world phishing messages.

Social networking websites are a major threat because the users' profiles contain personal information and compromised accounts could be efficiently used for spear phishing attacks. Phishers mainly focused on copying eBay and PayPal in the first half of 2010. The HSBC bank stood third on the list, while EGG and Poste Italiane concluded the list.

The report further reveals that majority of the phishing messages spammed out in the first half of 2010 were written in English (encompassing around 75% of all the messages processed by BitDefender). French and Swedish grabbed the second and third positions with 13% and 3% respectively. Russian spam ranked fourth with an approximate rate of 2%, and the unsolicited messages written in Bulgarian grabbed the last place with 0.42% of the world phishing messages.

The report also highlights that the recent floods in Guatemala (Central America) and the FIFA World Cup (2010) were two of the many events used for the purpose of Black-Hat SEO to improve the ranking of the diverse malware serving websites in the first half of 2010.

BitDefender also states in its latest report that critical zero-day exploits on famous software like Adobe Photoshop CS 4, Internet Explorer Browser from Adobe Reader or Microsoft and even Adobe Reader also played significant roles in spreading malware in the first half of 2010. Some of the Internet Explorer exploits were used to target big companies such as Adobe Reader, Rackspace and Google.