There are lies, damned lies and statistics. Or something like that. However, there are also some really interesting figures emerging about online life right now which are worthy of repeating here.

How about this report that the numbers of web sites on the Internet has risen from, can you believe it, just 50 in 1992 to an astonishing 162 million today. That's probably worth repeating, 162 million web sites. Now how many have you bookmarked and how many, apart from DaniWeb and Google of course, do you visit every day?

Another report that has caught my eye is rather less joyful, although equally astonishing. It concerns the number of viruses and malware floating around, and predicts that the number will hit one million by the end of this year. Perhaps even more amazing is the suggestion that around 25 percent of all unique malware has been created in just the last six months of the 20 year history of viruses.

The final number is perhaps the most sobering though, and that is the 219,553 complaints about online crime that were received by the Internet Crime Complaints Centre last year. Of these 90,008 were referred to law enforcement agencies, and the total dollar loss for these referred complaints came to a whopping $239 million, a median loss of $680 per complainant.