The sheer scale of the cyber security threat to businesses was highlighted again today, after new statistics from security vendor Trend Micro revealed that its Smart Protection Network (SPN) now blocks an average of more than four billion threats a day.

SPN is Trend Micro's newest technology designed to fight today's threats as effectively as possible, combining cloud-based reputation technology with behavioural analysis techniques.

The system stops many of the threats in the cloud, crucially negating the problems associated with traditional security tools, such as eating up processing power and network bandwidth, according to Trend Micro senior security analyst Rik Ferguson.

SPN has been up and running for 16 months, but saw significant growth between the third quarter of 2008 and the second quarter of 2009, when the number of global user queries jumped 289 per cent to over 29 billion a day.

The number of threats blocked over the same period rose 277 per cent to just over four billion, the company said. Threats in this instance include infected files, as well as web destinations reached through the browser and infected PCs trying to connect to a resource on the internet, according to Ferguson.

"We fully expect these numbers to increase as more people use the technology and the threats increase in volume, as historically they always have," he said.