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."

The 2006 Web@Work Employee survey reveals that men are more likely than women to engage in personal web surfing at work. Almost two-thirds (65 percent) of men who access the internet from work admitted to accessing non work-related websites during work hours versus 58 percent of women. Similarly, men are more likely to spend more time on the Internet at work for both work-related and non work-related tasks than women do.

For example, men admit to spending 11.6 hours on average per week on work-related websites and 2.3 hours per week on non-work related websites. In comparison, women admit to surfing 9.0 hours on average on work-related and personal sites and admit to spending only 1.5 hours per week on non work-related sites only.

Men and women also vary on the types of non work-related websites they visit in the workplace. For example, men are substantially more likely than women to visit non work-related sites such as weather, sports, investment/stock, and blogs-men are 1.15 times more likely than women to visit weather sites (81 per cent of men versus 70 per cent of women), 2.3 times more likely than women to visit sports sites (42 percent of men versus 18 per cent of women), 1.95 times more likely than women to visit investment/stock purchasing sites (39 percent of men versus 20 per cent of women), and 2.5 times more likely than women to visit blogs (15 per cent of men versus 6 per cent of women).