Spam, viruses, phishing and malware all went up in May compared to April, with nine out of ten spam emails containing the URL link in the message, according to a new MessageLabs Intelligence report from Symantec.

According to the report, 5% of all domains found in spam URLs belonged to genuine web sites and of the most frequently used domain names contained in spam URLs, the top four belong to well-known web sites used for social networking, blogging, file sharing and host other forms of user-generated content.

Storm was the only botnet that uses genuine domains in greater number than disposable domains. 65% of spam from the Storm botnet uses a legitimate domain, many of which are for URL shortening services.

In May 2010, the global ratio of spam in email traffic from new and previously unknown bad sources was 90%, an increase of 0.3% points since April, while the ratio of email-borne viruses in email traffic increased to 0.473% in May, an increase of 0.18% points since April. 22.6% of email-borne malware contained links to malicious websites, a decrease of 6.3 percentage points since April.

The report showed that phishing activity increased by 0.2 percentage points to 0.42%. When judged as a proportion of all email-borne threats, the proportion of phishing emails had increased by 10.3 percentage points to 80.6% of all email-borne malware and phishing threats combined. New web-based malware accounted for 12% of the total generated in May, an increase of 1.5 percentage points since April.

The proportion of global spam that comes from Africa overall has increased to 3% of global spam in May 2010 from just under 2% in April 2009, reflecting an extra 1.2 billion spam emails being sent from Africa daily compared to one year ago.

Hungary took the top spot as the most spammed country with spam levels increasing to 95.4% in May, while the UK remained the most active country for phishing attacks with 1 in 121.8 emails. In the US, 90.5% of email was spam and 89.4% in Canada. Spam levels in the UK were 89.6%. In the Netherlands, spam accounted for 91.1% of email traffic, while spam levels reached 89.5% in Australia and 91.8% in Germany.