The global internet community's worst nightmare has come true. Virus writers and spammers have teamed up to unleash a wave of more sophisticated and pernicious e-mail security threats, according to industry experts. 'There has been a fundamental change in the nature of spam over the first six months of this year,' said Andy Lake, director of Greater China and Southeast Asia sales and operations at e-mail security services firm MessageLabs. 'A convergence of virus and spam interests has emerged. There are people writing viruses now making money from creating spam and becoming involved with organised crime.' In the first half of this year, most of the viruses that MessageLabs intercepted on behalf of its more than 8,500 corporate customers around the world were found to have the potential for spam distribution. The company scans an average of more than 60 million e-mails a day for spam or virus signatures. Intercepted e-mail carried viruses such as SoBig, MyDoom, NetSky, Bugbear and Bagle - all malicious programs designed to aid the spread of spam. An analysis of Asia-Pacific e-mail traffic scanned by MessageLabs between January and June reveals a massive growth of spam and virus levels. It found 42.7 per cent of those e-mails were spam, up from 13.01 per cent in the first half of last year. Meanwhile, 15.96 per cent of the e-mails scanned by MessageLabs during this first half contained a virus. That is a huge jump from the average of 1.25 per cent recorded in the same period last year. Of about five billion e-mails worldwide that its anti-spam service scanned between January and June, MessageLabs identified 3.18 billion, or 63.5 per cent, as spam. The company's anti-virus service scanned 5.62 billion e-mails in the first half of this year, of which nearly 468 million, or 8.3 per cent, contained a virus. Paul Wood, chief information security analyst at MessageLabs, said virus writers were using their capabilities 'to hijack computers and create networks of zombie machines that send millions of spam e-mail'. The phishing phenomenon has also been on the rise. These online fraud scams involve the use of viruses, spam, spoofed websites and other social engineering techniques to dupe computer users into entering their personal details. An average of about 250,000 phishing-related e-mails were detected by MessageLabs in the first half of this year. That compares with just 14 such e-mails it intercepted in August last year. Alyn Hockey, director of research at electronic communications management software maker Clearswift, said adult products and services were not generating sufficient returns, so spammers had switched to using stock tips and consumer products as a hook. In June, MessageLabs also broke the news that spammers had started using spyware. This malicious program can automatically send personal information about a computer user back to spammers, who then use that information in the subject line of subsequent spam e-mail. But Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at security software maker Sophos, said virus writers 'haven't had it all their own way so far' this year. He said increased scrutiny from law enforcement agencies and Microsoft's bounty initiative were encouraging people to snitch on virus writers. That led to the high-profile arrest in May of Sven Jaschan, teenage author of the Sasser worm and member of the Skynet gang responsible for distributing NetSky, in Germany. Computer engineer Wang Ping-an was also arrested for allegedly writing and distributing a Trojan Horse program that enabled hackers to steal sensitive information from Taiwan's government computers. The consensus among information security industry experts is that Asia has become the preferred area of operations for these spammers and their virus-writing cohorts. CI Host, a global web hosting and internet systems provider, estimated that about 75 per cent of spam originated in Asia. Mr Lake, who also serves as secretary for the Hong Kong Internet Service Providers Association, said China had emerged as a leading source of both English- and Asian-language spam. 'A lot of global spammers are hosted in China,' he said. MessageLabs found e-mail traffic sent to the United States, Britain, Germany, Australia and Hong Kong represented more than 97 per cent of the global spam volumes the company had filtered.