Underscoring the risk, the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) found that approximately 27 percent of the 42, 854 agency-reported security incidents during the 2011 fiscal year involved malicious code.

FORBES: GAO: Global IT Supply Chain Poses New National Security Risk

"There was little financial loss" from the last round of Sobig "because the places where it was logging to were disabled, " says Martin Lindner of the Computer Emergency Readiness Team at Carnegie Mellon.

FORBES: Criminal Outbreak

The US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) has told computer users to be wary of potential e-mail scams, as well as fake anti-virus and phishing attacks regarding the Japan earthquake and the tsunami disasters.

BBC: 'Radiation' text message is fake