The annual IBM Internet Security Systems security trends report published Tuesday shows 7,427 software bugs were cataloged last year, an increase of 39.5% over the number of vulnerabilities identified in 2005.

IBM listed itself among the Top 10 vendors, whose products accounted for 964 of the 7,424 disclosed software vulnerabilities. According to the report, the Top 10 vendors for last year, in descending order, are: Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Mozilla, IBM, Linux Kernal Organization, Sun, Cisco, HP and Adobe Systems.

The report says 86% of the Top 10 vendors’ publicly disclosed vulnerabilities received a software patch.

The remaining balance of the 2006 vulnerabilities are ascribed to “other vendors,” and 65% of these software flaws were patched, according the IBM ISS report.

The 39.5% spike in the number of vulnerabilities can be attributed to the type of tools security experts use now to evaluate software, says Gunter Ollmann, director of security strategy at IBM Internet Security Systems. “The use of fuzzing technology in the automated tools can find where bugs lie,” Ollman says.

Automated fuzzing tools typically run scripts that are tuned to throw garbled data at an application and see how it handles it, revealing many unwanted code-execution risks. These are often cataloged as medium risks, rather than high- or low-risk.

In general, the number of vulnerabilities discovered each year has been growing since 2000, and the risks associated with those vulnerabilities have been getting worse. In the year 2000, only 43.6% of vulnerabilities could be remotely exploited, while in 2006, that number reached 88.4%, according to the report.

Spam and phishing trends also are changing.

For one, spam messages have grown in size over the last two years, increasing from an average of 6KB to 9.5KB. “This is largely due to the increased inclusion of random data designed to help spam bypass the first-generation antispam technologies, and the use of images to convey message content,” the IBM ISS report states.

The report also found that spam messages are overwhelmingly sent in English, with only the languages of German, Korean, Portuguese and Russian appearing in any amount worth noting.

Geographically, IBM ISS points to South Korea (16.33%), Spain (14.71%), the United States (10.95%), France (9.92%), Brazil (6.76%), Israel (6.41%), Germany (5.27%), Italy (4.34%), Poland (3.28%) and Argentina (2.64%) as source countries with the greatest measured volumes of phishing e-mail transmitted.