Some sobering reading material landed in my inbox last week in the form of an internet threat report.

Compiled twice a year by security company Symantec, the report summarises data collected from business and consumer internet users around the world.

Of the concerning trends covered in this edition, one of the most eye catching was the dramatic rise in the number of new malicious code threats that are targeting computer users.

According to Symantec, by the end of 2007, the number of unique identified threats stood at 1,122,311. Of this alarming total, 711,912 of the threats were identified in 2007, representing a 468 per cent increase on the previous year.

Such numbers are enough to send a shiver down the spine of any company CIO or IT manager, charged with ensuring systems vital to the day-to-day running of their organisation remain secure.

In fact, the number of malicious code threats is rising so quickly that Symantec’s experts believe the world may be rapidly heading for a security “tipping point”.

This point will be reached when the number of legitimate programs in the world is outnumbered by the malicious or illegitimate ones.

When this happens, the traditional method of blacklisting known malicious code loses some of its effectiveness and appeal. The effort and expense of maintain a list of known bad code continues to increase to the point where it becomes a significant burden on both security companies and their customers.

Instead, a white listing system will have to be implemented. This list will be a comprehensive summary of all legitimate programs that should be allowed to exist on a corporate network. If a particular batch of code doesn’t appear on this list, it must be deemed malicious.

To back its prediction, Symantec pointed to research conducted for the report that looked at the adoption of new applications on Windows-based PCs. The researchers found that, of some 54,000 unique applications deployed on Microsoft Windows PCs, 65 per cent were malicious.

It’s a trend that is not going to slow anytime soon. For organisations to have any hope of maintaining security, a white list system may be the only choice. Any alternative is going to become too expensive and cumbersome to maintain.