According to the April 2011 ThreatNet report, criminal syndicates that deploy `black hat' search engine optimisation have exploded as well.
The result, says the East European IT security vendor, is a large number of malware-laden sites being created to perform all sorts of tricks to get them returned as the primary links in search engine results.
The report also found that the Libyan war has also provided ample inspiration for cybercriminals in the last few weeks.
ESET researchers are also reporting an upsurge in Nigerian letter scams which cost gullible PC users billions of dollars every year.
Just recently, says the report, a new type of Nigerian letter appeared, using the Libyan crisis as bait and "government funds" as a hook.
The report cites the 419hell.com website, which reports on these types of cyber-threats, as saying that someone falls for this type of scam every 44 seconds.
Aryeh Goretsky, a researcher with ESET, said that malware has thrived on the demise of Osama bin Laden and his team is seeing a similar upsurge on Facebook.
"It's easy to see why: With over five hundred million active users, Facebook would rank just behind China and India as the third-most populated country in the world, if it happened to be a country", he explained.
According to the report, European threat statistics propelled a newcomer, Win32/Autoit, into the top three threats during the month, with a 2.64% share.
Win32/Autoit, says the study, is a worm that mainly uses removable media to propagate, with some of it variants also spreading via instant messaging channels.
It may, notes the report, arrive as a downloaded file from a malicious website or may also be dropped by another malware. Once executed, the darkware downloads additional threats or variants of itself.