The findings come from an in-depth series of international studies involving remote workers. Conducted this summer by an independent third-party market research firm, the research provides responses from more than 1,000 remote workers and 1,000 IT decision makers in 10 countries: the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, China, India, Australia and Brazil. The latest findings highlight the gravity of research issued in October, which reveals contradictions between remote workers' security awareness and actual behavior as well as disconcerting perceptions of IT's role in controlling use of work-issued laptops, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and smartphones.

Overall, 38 percent of the IT decision makers reported increases in security-related helpdesk calls. These calls involve users and their work devices falling prey to virus attacks, phishing scams, identity theft, hacking and other malicious activity. In India, more than half (55 percent) of the IT respondents reported a rise in security-related calls, and a majority of the issues involved viruses (70 percent), spam-enabled phishing attacks (61 percent) and spyware (55 percent). In all, blended spam and phishing encounters represented the most commonly reported issue - more than half (52 percent) of all IT respondents said the rise in helpdesk calls was related to this combined threat.

As a result, two of every three (67 percent) IT respondents said they expect their security-related IT investments to increase next year. And two of every five (41 percent) expect spending to jump by more than 10 percent. IT professionals in China, India, and Brazil - three relative newcomers to the Internet yet three of the world's fastest-growing networked economies - led the pack.