Spyware grew 213% in 2005 and continues to grow, says Ziv Cohen, eSafe product manager for Israeli security company Aladdin.
"Our research shows malicious code to be the highest concern and will continue to be for a time to come," he says.
Web attacks do not appear as "outbreaks" the same way e-mail viruses do, he explains, because they cannot be quantified.
"They are not coming to us like in e-mails," he says. "We are going to them by Web surfing."
Cohen says bots are constantly (and automatically) defacing Web sites by planting malicious code into them, which surfers unknowingly download. "One way this is done is by a `drive-by` exploit," he says. "The Web page contains JavaScript with an exploit that tries to download and execute rogue spyware applications on the client side by bypassing IE security zones."
Phishing is also on the rise, and becoming more sophisticated, he says. So are "false security" sites that use trusted sites through which bogus security solutions are offered.
2006 has seen an increase in three-phase phishing attacks, he says. These are phishing scams that include the use of a phishing e-mail, a phishing site and malicious code on the Web sites.
"Unfortunately, the public is still largely uneducated. We will click `yes` 99% of the time, even if just to get the pop-up to disappear," he concludes.
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