Book bed and breakfast, catch computer virus

WASHINGTON: The number of computer viruses is growing extraordinarily fast and shifting from phishing e-mails to being hidden in seemingly safe websites such as a local bed and breakfast, Internet security company Symantec Corp said in a new report yesterday.

There has been a huge increase in the number of viruses and worms, also called "malicious code", on the Web with 624,267 identified in 2007 compared with 1.6 million last year, according to Symantec.

"Sixty percent of all the (malicious code) threats in the past 20 years came in the last 12 months alone," said Vincent Weafer, Symantec's vice president of security content and intelligence.