The World Wide Web is not a safe place but emails are getting safer, says MessageLabs Intelligence, which also notes a March, 2011 report, indicating that an average of 2,973 web sites each day harbor malware and other unwanted programs, including spyware and adware.

About 37 per cent of all malicious domains blocked were new in March. Also, 24.5 per cent of all web-based malware blocked was new in this month.

The advertisements and popups category accounted for 47.5 per cent of blocked web activity for businesses and social networking accounted for 14 per cent of URL-based filtering activity blocked in March.

"Many organizations allow access to social networking web sites, but facilitate access logging so that usage patterns can be tracked and in some cases implement policies to only permit access at certain times of the day and block access at all other times," Pun added.