A number of major websites across the UK and US have been hit by a "Trojan cocktail", according to a new report.

ScanSafe today reported that as of Friday, 55,000 websites had been reportedly affected by the method of hacking, though this has since increased to 64,700 - an eight per cent rise in the space of just a few days.

The Trojan cocktail is essentially a major mix of backdoors, worms, password theft devices and downloader programs which aim to tunnel into the juiciest of information that a company has to offer, using websites as a landing pad.

Speaking to IT Pro, Mary Landesman, a senior ScanSafe researcher, explained the gravity of what many websites are dealing with and said: "This is the type of malware in terms of its inner workings very similar to what they had at Heartland Payment Systems."

Heartland Payment Systems was the victim of a huge data breach at the beginning of the year, with the organisation seeing 100 million debit and credit card records compromised by malicious coding.

According to a recent survey by Connect, the two biggest IT headaches for businesses were 'everyday hassles with IT' (37 per cent) and 'security concerns' (32 per cent).