Online security firm Websense has revealed the findings from its latest bi-annual research report, which looked at the state of Internet security for the last half of 2009. It found that 71% of websites with malicious code are legitimate sites that have been compromised and 85.8% of all emails were spam (junk).

Websense used its ThreatSeeker™ Network to discover, classify and monitor global Internet threats and trends. Every hour, it scans more than 40 million websites and 10 million emails for malicious code and unwanted content (spam). We've summarised the major findings below.

Web Security
• 13.7% of searches for trending news/buzz words (as defined by Yahoo Buzz & Google Trends) led to malware.
• While the first half of 2009 saw a sharp rise in the number of malicious Web sites, the second half of the year revealed a 3.3% decline in growth. Websense Security Labs believes this is due to the increased focus on Web 2.0 properties with higher traffic and multiple pages. Websense Security Labs has identified:
• • Gumblar, Beladen, Nine Ball and other mass injection campaigns led to a higher number of attacks in April & June over other months.
• • Overall, comparing the second half of 2009 with the same period in 2008, we have seen an average of 225% growth in malicious Web sites.
• 71% of Web sites with malicious code are legitimate sites that have been compromised.
• 95% of user-generated posts on Web sites are spam or malicious.
• Consistent with previous years, the majority of malware still connects to host Web sites registered in the US (51.4%). China (17.2%) remains the second most popular hosting country. In the last six months Spain, which has never appeared in the top 5 listing, has leapt to third place with 15.7% (a 14.5% rise from the first half of the year).

Email Security
• 81% of emails during the second half of the year contained a malicious link.
• Websense Security Labs identified that 85.8% of all emails were spam.
• • Statistics for the second half of 2009 show spam emails broke down as 72% (HTML), 11.2% (image), 14.4% (plain text with URL) and 2.4% (plain text with no URL).
• • Spammers are sending an increased number of blended attacks.
• Tens of thousands of Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo email accounts were hacked and passwords stolen and posted online which resulted in a marked increase in the number of spam emails.
• Phishing lures have doubled since the first half of the year representing approximately 4% of spam email.
• Websense saw a rising number of shortened URLs in spam messages, a decrease in the use of image spam, and a consistently high number of emails that contained links to URLs.

Data Security
• 35% of malicious Web-based attacks included data-stealing code.
• 58% of all data-stealing attacks are conducted over the Web.
• US, Russia, China and Brazil are consistently in the top 5 countries hosting crimeware and receiving stolen data. Canada

The emerging trends and predictions by Websense researchers point towards increasingly blended security threats attempting to rope computers into bot networks and steal valuable confidential information. Specifically, hackers will look to compromise new platforms such as smartphones, take advantage of the popularity of Windows 7, compromise the integrity of search engine results and use legitimate advertisements to spread their malicious content; much like any other year.

There will apparently also be even more spam and attacks on the social web and real-time search engines such as Topsy.com, Google and Bing.com. The trend, set to continue this year, began in 2009 with increased malicious use of social networks and collaboration tools such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Google Wave to spread attackers’ wares. These attacks have been successful because of the trust users place in the platforms and the other users.