According to Kaspersky's Senior Virus Analyst Alexander Gostev, in an unusual turn of events, <A HREF="http://www.viruslist.com/">October's online threat list</A> shows stability that Kaspersky has not seen before. Three malicious programs managed to retain the same positions as they had last month, and only five malicious programs are new to the rankings; something that Gostev notes is "an unprecedentedly low figure for our most volatile statistics."

On the side of email threats, two mass mailings reared their heads at the end of October. According to Kaspersky, these threats, a Fraud.ay phishing attack and a PDF-based threat known as Exploit.Win32.PDF-URI.k, turned out to be among the biggest mass mailings seen in the last few months, especially on the Russian Internet. The reports are available now on Kaspersky Lab's Viruslist site.