INTRODUCTION
Gearing up Researchers at Kaspersky Lab highlight the radical change in security attacks and the simultaneous opportunity this creates for security vendors to create solutions that help enterprises stay ahead of the game.
The transition from cybervandalism to cybercrime has had a significant impact on the current security landscape, according to David Emm, senior security researcher at Kaspersky Lab. “In the ‘good old days’, malware was designed to disrupt a computer. By contrast, the focus of cybercrime is to steal information that can be used to make money. So the last thing a cybercriminal wants to do is to disrupt the victim’s system - their business depends on my computer running normally. At one level, the job of security companies remains the same – i.e. block malicious code. But the focus on maintaining the integrity of someone’s data, and securing their online identity, has
led to the inclusion of technologies that go beyond simply looking for malicious code. So today’s comprehensive Internet security suites include virtual keyboards, application sandboxing, white listing and more,” he says. Emm adds, “It’s not just the shift in motivation that has widened the array of technologies used in anti-malware solutions. We’ve seen an explosion in the number of malicious programs in recent years. Just five years ago, our virus lab received around 200 new samples per day. Today, our analysts receive 125,000 unique malware samples every day! And there are tens of millions of samples in our collection. One of the reasons for this is the decreased ‘shelf-life’ of
malware. In the 1990s viruses were comparatively slow to spread, but once they reached ‘critical mass’ they might circulate for many years. Today, an individual variant might last no more than a week. So many of the samples we see are variants of existing malware families - churned out by cybercriminals to refresh earlier versions.” According to executives at Kaspersky Lab, 2011 was a pivotal year in the development of mobile malware. The company saw the same volume of threats in 2011 alone as it did in the period from 2004 through till 2010. “Currently there are more than 20,000 mobile malware threats - that’s a rate of around five per hour. The fastest
3