People sending spam to both personal and company inboxes will continue to do so as long as there is money to be made by the activity, a security specialist has revealed.

Carole Theriault, a senior security consultant at online protection company Sophos, revealed that spamming would always be intrinsically linked to fraudulent greed.

She continued by highlighting the importance of computer security patches, adding that people must install security patches provided by such companies as Microsoft to ensure that their computer or IT support network is well up-to-date with recent developments.

Ms Theriault said: "Make sure that you have anti-virus in place, make sure that you have a firewall turned on.

"Nothing's free. If it seems too good to be true then it probably is."

According to the recent security threat report by Sophos in July 2008, it was found that over 11 million malware threats were in existence all over the world, with one new spam-related page discovered once every 20 seconds.

In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were guaranteed response times and allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues.