Corporate and industrial espionage attacks are on the rise using targeted trojans intended to steal intellectual property and confidential information, according to the 2006 Annual MessageLabs Intelligence Report.

MessageLabs now intercepts two attacks each day, compared to one per week at the same point in 2005.

The targeted approach is prevalent in phishing attacks too, an increasingly dominant force in all malicious emails intercepted by MessageLabs, with levels rising from 10.6 per cent in January to 68.8 per cent in December.

Mark Sunner, chief technology officer at MessageLabs said: '2006 was the year that spammers took the security industry by storm and showcased their new tactics and techniques for mass disruption. Now accounting for almost nine out of 10 emails, spam has categorically shed its title of being a nuisance and is a perilous threat which all companies need to be protected against.'

'The next year will certainly bring more targeted and sophisticated attacks as the bad guys continue to sharpen their tools. Companies need to take a layered and proactive security approach by fighting against cyber-criminals from ‘in the cloud’ at the internet level,' said Sunner.

A key component in the success of these highly targeted attacks is the distribution of spyware and adware which has grown into a multibillion dollar industry and fuelled an increase in the number of botnets being created.

Botnets have the ability to retrieve information such as cracked usernames, passwords, credit card numbers and other personal data stored in the web-browser’s auto-fill database.

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