Website-infecting attacks spike to 450,000 a day

Cybercriminals are spreading invisible infections far and wide across the Internet by hammering hundreds of thousands of websites each day with so-called SQL injection attacks. The trend started last summer and has continued to accelerate. IBM Internet Security Systems says it identified 50% more infected Web pages in the last three months of 2008 than it did in all of 2007. Click on one and you won't notice anything. Your PC gets turned into an obedient "bot," short for robot, deployed to attack other computers. All of your sensitive data get stolen. Security experts say consumers must keep updates for anything to do with their browser current, though most now do not do this. This includes updates for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome, Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, iTunes, QuickTime, Windows Media Player and RealPlayer. Such updates increasingly include important security patches that can block infections from taking hold.