Facebook accounted for 12.8% of phishing messages in July 2010, more than three times as much as in the previous month, nudging eBay into third place with 7.6%, said Kaspersky's latest spam report.

The e-commerce business PayPal remained in first place after being targeted by 53.48% of all phishing attacks.

With the number of phishing attacks declining by one percentage point, Google left the list of the Top 5 most popular phishing targets in July, falling to 9th position with a 7.3% share of phishing messages.

The US and India maintained their leading positions as the most popular sources of spam, distributing 1.5 times as much spam compared with June at, 17.2% and 9%, respectively.

Europe caused the most noticeable change in July's rating with the UK, Germany and Italy all making it into the Top 10.

The total volume of spam originating from their combined territories increased by 50 percentage points compared with the previous month.

In July, the UK ranked 5th with 4.3%, above Russia (4.2%), Germany (3.5%), Brazil (2.9%) and Poland (2.8%).

This story was first published by Computer Weekly