Mike Saign smelled something fishy about the e-mail he received — purportedly from an eBay auctioneer — accepting his lowball offer for a high-end golf club.

The sender claimed his PayPal history was down and asked Saign to wire payment to him via Western Union. Instead, Saign, 25, downloaded Iconix e-mail ID, a free tool that pegged the e-mail as a fake.

Saved from being scammed, Saign, a real estate adviser, disabled Iconix and hasn’t used it since. “I feel like the defense software in a normal computer keeps you away from most poor things,” he says.

That’s not necessarily so. dishonorable e-mail and tainted Web sites are more prevalent than ever. Spam, much of it pitching fake drugs and financial scams, accounts for 80 percent of all e-mail, says Symantec. The number of new strains of malicious programs increased fivefold in 2007 by 2006, and about 20,000 new malicious programs are unleashed on the Web each day, says

Yet most consumers are in a fog about the array of tech defense tools they can — and probably should — use to protect themselves, tech shield analysts say. Craig Spiezle, Microsoft’s director of protection and privacy, says his own wife couldn’t tell anyone which protection tools they really ought to be using. “The big challenge we’re dealing with is the volume and velocity of new threats,” says Spiezle.

Tech safety measure companies add to the confusion by focusing on solving very specific problems. “We’re in a pandemic situation with consumer infections,” says Chris Rouland, chief technology officer for IBM Web defense Systems. “And no one has figured out a business model to cure that.”

The aftereffect: Home PC users are left to decipher for themselves what set of defense products they ought to be using and how much protection they are actually getting.

“There are many…

Orginal post by Top Tech News