Viruses cause most security breaches

Viruses remain the biggest cyberthreat to businesses, according to a government report to be released soon which will also warn that the threat of spyware is growing, .

The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) report into information security breaches found that approximately half of businesses said their worst security incidents over the past two years has been caused by virus infections, rather than other threats such as hacking or phishing.

The survey, which will be launched at Infosecurity Europe 2006 in London in April, showed that virus infections were also more likely to have caused serious service interruption than other incidents.

"Usually the disruption was minor, but roughly a quarter of companies questioned who reported a virus as their worst incident had major disruption, with important services such as email down for more than a day," the authors of the survey said in a statement.