Phishing attacks on Facebook, as well as other social networking sites such as Habbo are growing like topsy, according to the latest spam report from Kaspersky Lab.

In June the increase was marked at 4.07 and 6.25 per cent respectively, pushing these sites to third and fourth places in the list of those attacked most. PayPal and eBay attractmost attention from phishers in the last month, but that is because you know that the punters have money.

The volume of spam in mail traffic increased slightly compared to May and averaged 83.3 per cent. The most popular topics for cybercriminals to hook spam on were Osama bin Laden’s death, the last Harry Potter movie and the anniversary of the death pop has-been, with an interest in drugs and children, Michael Jackson

Kaspersky Lab predict a surge in spam linked to Google+ after signs that spammers have begun exploiting the growing interest in the new social network. Maria Namestnikova, Senior Spam Analyst at Kaspersky Lab is expecting an increase in unsolicited emails exploiting the new Google social network. They will most likely contain both phishing links and malicious code.

There was a slight decrease in the amount of malware blocked in mail traffic in June. Malicious files were found in 3.8 per cent of all emails, a decrease of 0.3 per cent compared with the previous month. There were no major changes to the Top 10 countries where mail antivirus detected malware most frequently. Italy moved up from sixth to fourth place following an increase of 1.5 per cent. Trojan-Spy.HTML.Fraud.gen still occupied first place among the Top 10 malicious programs distributed via mail traffic.

Meanwhile one in three of all English-language spam is fraudulent and was either sent with the intention of extorting money from users or contained a malicious attachment or link to malicious code. Pharmaceutical spam was the second most popular category. Offers of quick earnings and dubious personal loans, various goods and services along with fake designer goods were among the other most prominent categories of spam in June.