Halloween is a time of the year when small businesses in IT should be extra wary of any malware threats sent via emails or malicious websites, according to an expert in the industry.

Muktadir Khan, the European sales engineer at Sunbelt Software, said that such problems are regularly delivered through a number of methods which masquerade as holiday greetings, such as emails with dancing skeletons, Halloween gift cards or Halloween sales emails.

He asserted that an effective and updated antivirus solution is necessary, adding: "We advise users to be vigilant and to ensure their antivirus applications are fully up-to-date with the latest definition files and the latest application version installed.

"Users should avoid opening any attachments, even from trusted sources, without first running a scan on the file."

Today, Gizmodo editorial director Brian Lam admitted that his website's advertising team were tricked into running ads filled with malware, masquerading as those for Suzuki.

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.