The percentage of threats arriving in email that rely on links to malicious sites--rather than arriving as a file attachment--<A HREF="http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,137786-pg,1/article.html">has ballooned 10-fold since the first quarter of the year.</A>

In a report published Thursday, U.K.-based MessageLabs Ltd. said that 35 percent of the email threats it now detects use embedded links to infect computers instead of the more traditional file attachments. In the March-June time frame, that figure was 20.2 percent, said the company. And in the opening quarter of 2007, a mere 3.3 percent of the intercepted threats carried links.