Spyware thrives in the corporate space

The number of companies reporting spyware infestation has increased by just under 50 per cent over the past 12 months, according to a survey released by internet security specialists Websense.

According to the annual Websense Web@Work survey, published on Tuesday, 17 per cent of companies with more than 100 employees have spyware - such as a keylogger - on their network.

Joel Camissar, country manager for Websense, said: "This is almost 50 per cent growth in the instances of keyloggers that organisations are reporting back. Despite the organisations having a best-of-breed antivirus, anti-spyware and firewall, we are still detecting a huge amount of back-channel spyware communication".

One reason for this growth in spyware infestation is a massive increase in the number of spyware-making toolkits being sold online, said Camissar, who referred to some research that was conducted in partnership with the Anti-Phishing Working Group, earlier this year.

He said: "In April 2005 there were 77 unique password stealing applications. In the latest March report there were 197. Unique websites hosing keyloggers in the same timeframe have gone up from 260 to 2,157 - almost a 10 times growth."

The survey also discovered that survey respondents did not have much faith in their staff being able to distinguish between genuine and phishing websites.

Camissar added: "Forty-seven per cent of IT decision makers said their employees have clicked on phishing emails and 44 per cent believe employees cannot accurately identify phishing sites.

"I am surprised that the results are not showing a larger growth in the number of organisations hit by this kind of threat."

Munir Kotadia writes for ZDNet Australia