US workers facing more spyware encounters, says Trend Micro

Spyware threats remain a growing concern in corporate environments, security software company Trend Micro reports. Based on the results of a survey among 1200 end-users in various sizes of companies in the US, Germany and Japan, the firm claims that 87 percent of corporate end users are aware of spyware, and yet 53 percent of survey respondents demand greater education from IT to better understand the threat.

Spyware appears to be more of a problem in the US, however, where 40 percent of end users surveyed have encountered spyware at work, as compared to 14 percent in Japan and 23 percent in Germany. In all three countries, end users from SMB organizations reported a greater number of encounters than larger enterprises.

Only 45 percent of the respondents who said they had encountered spyware believed they had become an actual victim, according to the survey. "This reveals a striking distinction between end-user awareness of the spyware threat and whether corporate end users are knowledgeable enough to identify spyware infiltration, which quite often occurs without end users knowing it," Trend Micro said. For the US alone, 26 percent of American small business workers, and 21 percent of American enterprise workers stated that they had fallen victim to spyware while at work.