The growing threat to businesses from the web was put into sharper focus today, after security vendor Websense reported a whopping 671 per cent rise in the number of malicious sites during the past year.
The firm's biannual State of Internet Security (PDF) report is compiled using email and web site scanning data collected by Websense Security Labs. The report found growth not only in the number of malicious sites but in the continued activity designed to compromise legitimate sites.

In the first half of 2009, over three-quarters of web sites with malicious code were found to be legitimate sites that had been compromised. Recent widespread attacks such as NineBall and Gumblar were blamed for injecting malware into sites on a huge scale.