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According to FaceTime Communications, risky employee behavior is the reason behind the growing threat of botnets. FaceTime also discovered it actually isn't the total number of botnets that have increased, as more were uncovered in 2005 than 2006, but the increasing sophistication of botnets and the difficulty finding them that has lead to the recent explosion of spam.

FaceTime warns that today's malware is "stealthier, more complex and harder to identify and defend against." Also, FaceTime tracked 1,224 unique threats from "greynet" applications, programs which users download onto the corporate network usually without informing the IT department. Apparently, attacks over peer-to-peer networks increased by 140 percent over 2005 levels and multichannel attacks jumped to 29 percent of all attacks in 2006.

Also, as I've blogged before, FaceTime found that these new cybercriminals are well-funded, extremely savvy, and generally try to collect as much info as possible before moving to the next target. And it seems the main door these hackers use to get access is through greynet applications. According to the company's Second Annual Greynets Survey, 39 percent of users believe they should be allowed to "install the applications they need on their work computers," independent of IT oversight or policy, while 53 percent of users report they "tend to disregard" company policies that govern greynet usage, specifically IM and peer-to-peer file sharing.

The study also discovered that 80 percent of IT managers are at locations that have experienced greynet-related attacks within the last six months.

"Despite myriad security technologies employed by enterprise IT managers to block malicious attacks, the user is often the biggest vulnerability, especially on the real-time, socially-networked Web" said Frank Cabri, vice president of marketing for FaceTime, in a statement. "In 2007, the biggest security risk for organizations is likely to be their own users, as employees install consumer-oriented greynet applications onto their workplace computer faster than the IT team can keep up with the corresponding controls."

And as if we didn't know already, the motive behind most of these attacks are purely financial.

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