Almost three-quarters of the most popular websites on the internet hosted malicious content or a masked redirect in the second half of last year, research shows.

Websense Security labs found that the familiarity of seemingly "safe" sites was no guarantee for protection, as it discovered 70 per cent of the top 100 websites contained elements which could compromise security.

In the second half of 2008, the firm found that more than 77 per cent of the sites classed as malicious were from sites with apparently good reputations.

News of particular concern to those in risk management jobs is that 39 per cent of web attacks recorded by Websense involved the use of data-stealing code.

Dan Hubbard, the chief technology officer of Websense, says that criminals had "really stepped up their game" in key areas.

"Spammers are increasingly using links to malicious websites and spam sites in their email campaigns to lure users and evade security systems that lack web intelligence," he adds.

Earlier this month, Websense offered its security predictions for 2009 and in particular warned of spammers manipulating social networking sites.

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