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Helpdesk calls on the rise: Cisco Study  November 16, 2006  NEW DELHI: Cisco today released a final set of results from a global survey of information technology (IT) decision makers, revealing a sobering admission among many of them that security-related helpdesk calls are rising and that, to protect increasingly mobile workers, a majority will increase security spending next year – and two of every five will boost spending by more than 10 percent in 2007.  The findings come from an in-depth series of international studies involving remote workers. Conducted this summer by an independent third-party market research firm, the research provides responses from more than 1,000 remote workers and 1,000 IT decision makers in 10 countries: the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, China, India, Australia and Brazil.  The latest findings highlight the gravity of research issued in October, which reveals contradictions between remote workers’ security awareness and actual behavior as well as disconcerting perceptions of IT’s role in controlling use of work-issued laptops, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and smartphones.  Overall, 38 percent of the IT decision makers reported increases in security-related helpdesk calls. These calls involve users and their work devices falling prey to virus attacks, phishing scams, identity theft, hacking and other malicious activity. In India, more than half (55 percent) of the IT respondents reported a rise in security-related calls, and a majority of the issues involved viruses (70 percent), spam-enabled phishing attacks (61 percent) and spyware (55 percent).  In all, blended spam and phishing encounters represented the most commonly reported issue – more than half (52 percent) of all IT respondents said the rise in helpdesk calls was related to this combined threat.