According to the latest website monitoring statistics offered by the Chinese anti-virus software provider Rising, the number of websites plagued by viruses and phishers recently shows a growth trend and the company's Cloud Security system blocked 6.83 million visits to websites with viruses on January 20, 2009, alone.

Rising says the computers of these netizens may be embedded with trojan downloaders or online game theft trojans that can steal users' login details. At the same time, Rising warns netizens that some popular ticket websites like Piaocn.com has been embedded with malicious code. Once the user visit these websites, their computers will download a large number of account theft viruses, leading to losses of IDs for online games, Internet bank accounts and QQ instant message accounts.

Security experts from Rising say that at present, ticket websites and film download websites are the hardest-hit areas by viruses, accounting for 80% of the total websites with viruses and embedded malware, because these websites are the most visited ones during holidays. China starts a week-long holiday next week to welcome the Year of the Ox.

Rising advises its users to install the 2009 edition of its anti-virus software and open the trojan block function to prevent these trojans from entering their computers. In addition, users should download and install patches to their computers and pay close attention to Chinese websites whose addresses end with irregular .CN letters when searching for information via Internet search engines.