Trend Micro has recently released a study revealing that 53% of employees demand better training and education from their IT departments to better combat spyware threats even though more than 87% of users are aware of the malware issue. Indeed, the results of the security firm's research show that awareness does not necessarily translate to knowledge, which also indicates that users are depending upon their IT departments to play a more active role against such matters.

The study involved 1,200 people from businesses ranging from single-office organizations to large, multinational enterprises within the countries of Japan, Germany, and the United States. It exposed several discoveries about user behavior and perceptions within the workplace, and many of them involved the ever-escalating spyware dilemma. According to Trend Micro's survey, spyware encounters have increased throughout the years, especially in small-sized and medium-sized companies.

Likewise, US-based users are five times more susceptible to spyware than their Japanese and German counterparts. Also, nearly 40% of American respondents who work in offices with IT departments felt that the IT staff should do more to help defend them against the spyware menace.

The statistics and findings for businesses within the United States support the fact that spyware remains a global threat despite the advancements in spyware detection and removal. For instance, corporate employees in Japan deemed that their spyware security is lacking, with two-thirds of small and medium business staff and one-half of enterprise workers having this particular worry.

Then again, of those surveyed who encountered spyware problems during office hours, only 45% thought that they had actually fallen victim to the online threat. This illustrates a significant difference between whether corporate users are educated enough to identify spyware infection (which often occurs without users knowing it) and awareness of the spyware contagion in the first place.

Because of the stark contrast between awareness and knowledge, many of the respondents depend quite a lot on their IT departments to provide further information on top of protection. Japan was most susceptible to this way of thinking, where a whopping 64% felt that it was the IT staff's job to educate them more about spyware protection and prevention. Germany had 45% of their workforce believing the same thing, while the United States yielded a 52% figure.

Because of the increasing sophistication of business security needs and the evolution of online dangers like spyware, there is now a need for companies to invest in multi-tiered, multi-layered security processes, with content security and antivirus services in the forefront. In fact, many programs like the award-winning AVG Antivirus Suite provide protection for all sorts of malware, whether they're viruses, worms, trojans, or even spyware.