The broadband service providing firm owned by the mobile phone giant of the United Kingdom, Carphone Warehouse, had come to this view after their carrying out a survey on the internet habits of the people, teaming up with a social anthropologist working at the University of Kent.

The broadband provider – social anthropologist team has claimed to have discovered through the research the existence of a couple of million people in the United Kingdom, in their early twenties that are tech-savvy, but did not wish to be rooted behind a desk. The research team has dubbed this group “first lifers”.

The research also revealed that about half of the first lifers group – that says about a number of around one million – no more used email. This according to the study was because they preferred the likes of Facebook and Twitter rather while on the internet, and messaging while on the move.

TalkTalk’s Mark Schimid commented on the development that people increasingly wanted to send short messages quickly as to reach many in one go, and there existed better ways for realizing that than through the stodgy email.

Schimid added that these trends that are more than apparent currently bode that email could be on its final phase by next decade’s end. TalkTalk is one of the providers of the cheapest business broadband offer packages in the United Kingdom.

Recently, Microsoft released a security report, according to which about 97 percent of the total number of emails sent all around the world was spam, or unwanted to be more precise. The report also said that most of these were advertisements that more often than not referred to health schemes and drugs, as others were concerned with easy money making methods. Something to worry here, according to the study was the lion’s share of these mails contained malicious codelines or software attached to them that could easily penetrate the computers of the receivers of these mails.

Some good news were also disclosed by the study that although a handful of mails managed to get through into the mail inbox of the receiver, the majority of the mails failed to hit the inbox. It is a fact that with today’s high speed broadband services, improved operating systems and high-end computers sending out billions of spam mails is a mere trifle. This was obviously not the condition four or five years before.

An analysis carried out by Message Labs, an email security concern, revealed that owing to the removal offline of a hacked ISP, the end of the year 2008 saw a dramatic drop of spam rates. A number of botnet technology developers were desperately striving to increase capacity to regain the botnet controls and hence return to the spam levels they had achieved previously.

The hackers’ most preferred target, or at least one of the most is the common file format. Microsoft’s Office Suite and Adobe’s PDF files contain many of these. Such files are mostly used by the hackers to penetrate their target computers, although the vile activities of these sources were considerably countered by highly potent defense software updates, the respective manufacturers released periodically.

The research shows that nearly one-thirds of the malware received via internet was new in May which shows a decline of 5.8 percent as against April. The internet security firm has found that malware that include spyware and adware have been transmitted by 1,311 new websites per day and there was a significant rise in the number of websites that spread programs related to malware.

As for the spam, the survey shows that every one in 1.30 emails contains spam and there was a rise in spam by 3.3 percent when compared with last month.

As for the month of May, viruses infect every one email in 170 emails showing an increase of 0.13 % as against the last month. During the last month, phishing attacks, however, saw a decline. According to the report, 0.38 percent of all emails had been attacked by phishers.

Interestingly, spam has been widespread in many countries. By May, US reported to have 73.4% of all mails containing spam, while it is 77.7% in Canada and 71.3% in the UK. The steady increase in global spam has been attributed to the new techniques used by the spammers who use hosted services offered by Googles Docs, Skydrive and Calendar to relay spams.

Sophos, a research firm released a report on countries that are sources of spam and also released a list of countries that relay spam worldwide. According to the latest report, the UK which was in the nineth position in the last report fell to 50th position, which is indeed good news. Other countries which saw decline in relaying spam include Japan (from 32 to 136), Canada (from 26 to 89) and Australia (from 33 to 85).

When population is taken as standard, the USA is placed in 64th position and tops the table followed by Russia and China. All these three nations contributed more than one-third of spam relayed during the fourth quarter of 2007. However, when spam emitted per capita is taken as standard, The Pitcairn Islands is in first place followed by countries like Niue, Tokelau, Anguilla, the Faroe Islands etc.

Carole Theriault of Sophos says:

“Between October-December 2007, the US relayed far more spam than any other country due to the sheer number of computers in the country that had been taken over by remote hackers,”

“But when measuring spam emitted per capita, the results are very different. Most of the countries in this chart have very small populations compared to the usual offenders, but their totals are sky high when it comes to spam emitted on a per-person basis. Just because your PC is located on a remote island in the South Pacific doesn’t mean it’s not contributing to the global spam problem. All computer users, wherever they are in the world, need to wake up to the threats and ensure their PCs are properly protected.”

The report also throws light on the internet skills acquired by individuals. More than half of the internet browsers were good at using search engines to find information. The other activity where the majority of the browsers were found to be skilled at was sending emails with attachments. However, only 10 percent of the internet users were able to create their web pages of their own.

Other statistics shows that there are 42 percent of households in Europe which are connected by broadband technology while in the UK, it is 57 percent showing 13 percent year-on-year growth during this year.