The level of dangers facing Internet users continues to rise, despite all of the precautions and beefed up security measures we have had to take over the past few years, according to Symantec's annual Internet Security Threat Report.

Web-based attacks were the primary means of stealing confidential information in 2008, the report states. One only has to look at the brief shutdown of Twitter on Saturday to see how much harm can be done. Even though no money was lost, lots of computers got infected by the worm, which spread through a malicious programme secretly put on the site.

The Twitter worm demonstrates how a web-based attack works. Twitter users were infected through their accounts. Once infected, the worm e-emailed itself to friends listed on the Twitter account. Each person who clicked on the e-mail then got infected...and so on. The infection kept referring users to a rival website, StalkDaily.com.

The Symantec study also noted that most web-based attacks occur when users visit legitimate websites that have been compromised by attackers. In 2008, Symantec found 12,885 site-specific vulnerabilities. About 63 percent of these affected web applications used by the website.

Identity fraud is another re-occurring problem that is not going to go away as the Internet matures. About 80 percent of such threats revealed user data, and 76 percent logged keystrokes to determine information such as banking account passwords. Phishing, luring users to fake websites and getting them to log in believing they were at their trusted bank or investment company, was another problem.

About 12 percent of all data breaches in 2008 exposed credit card information stored by companies on behalf of their users. In 2008 the average cost per incident of a data breach in the US was $6.7 million, an increase of five percent compared to 2007. Symantec estimates the lost business amounted to an average of $4.6 million.

So once again, be careful out there. Use an anti-virus programme and ensure you change your passwords every month or so (most of us cannot get around to doing this, but it is good advice).

Now let me get back to ridding my desktop computer of a browser infection, which keeps opening up a couples dating website. As I had to explain to my partner on Saturday when the offending site kept popping up: "It ain't me babe!"

I knew I should not have run a downloaded "free" programme I found on the Internet. Or I should have scanned it ahead of time with my virus checker, before running it. I would easily have found out it contains five different viruses, as far as I can determine. My virus checker took out three, but the other two are persistent.

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Yesterday, Microsoft officially reduced the level of support it would provide for Windows XP users. The support slowdown, previously announced for the seven-year-old operating system, is part of the pattern Microsoft regularly follows as it consigns Windows versions to history.

XP has now moved from "mainstream support" to "extended support". Support for the system will move from free to a pay-for service. But is Windows XP really on its way out? It's hard to determine for ordinary users, but for most businesses it's crucial to read the tea leaves. Of course Microsoft wants us to forget about Vista, which followed XP, but because of its bloated size and other problems, was never taken up by many businesses.

In fact Microsoft was forced to extend mainstream support for XP by over two years to console its market. Many businesses wisely stuck with XP. Now, many are waiting to see what Windows 7, the successor to Vista, brings to the table. Here again, Microsoft is not taking any chances, given the problems with Vista, and the natural tendency of IT specialists to stay with something that works.

When it introduces Windows 7 it will make it backward compatible, giving users the option of reverting it all the way back to XP, if they find their programmes no longer work as well as they should, or not at all.

As a sign of the caution Microsoft is taking, Windows XP users will still continue to get free security updates up until 8 April 2014.

So, do not expect any retirement of the system soon. I am sure the release of Windows 7, expected by the end of this year, will leave IT departments with a crucial decision to make.

Here again, I expect more of the wait-and-see attitude they took to Vista.

A survey of 1,100 IT professionals by Dimensional Research, and reported by InformationWeek found that 83 percent of enterprises plan not to change over to Windows 7 in the first year. We can expect those who do not, will be looking at the experiences of the 17 percent who do.

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