PandaLabs Shows Malware Growth of 800% in 2007

In 2007, the number of malware items detected showed a substantial increase of 800% with respect to 2006, security researchers at PandaLabs said in the third week of January 2008.

Malware examples in 2006 were also significantly high at 172% with respect to 2005, according to PandaLabs. These figures suggest that the rate of malware circulation has been increasing year on year. Also, during 2007, after identifying and assessing malware, PandaLabs found on average over 3,000 new pieces of malware every day. Such a trend is close to malware epidemic, which though do not have widespread alerts and media coverage, but is equally dangerous.

Further, solutions for protection that rely on continuous updates no longer guarantee that users would be sufficiently secured. This follows from a study in 2007 that PandaLabs carried out to find that a good 23% of users at home suffered malware infection, although they had installed and enabled security programs on their PCs.

The situation facing corporate is also similar. For PandaLabs found from its study that nearly 72% of corporate networks having 100 or more workstations were carrying some sort of malware infection.

Chief Corporate, Evangelist Ryan Sherstobitoff, at PandaLabs said that cyber crooks are overwhelming networks with so much malware that they have become unmanageable. SCMagazine published Sherstobitoff's statement on January 17, 2008.

Sherstobitoff also said that this saturation is done with the idea that if too much malware is injected, then possibly any protection would fail to cope with the amount and some of the malware could pass undetected. In this connection, it has been observed that a large number of criminal groups from Taiwan, Russia and other countries are developing large amounts of malware with the objective of committing economic fraud, Sherstobitoff said.

All the results of PandaLabs indicate that signature-based security defenses are currently insufficient to effectively curb malware. In addition, the number of viruses and malware in September 2007 outpaced the total amount in 2006, with 210,000 new strains counted. trojans that comprised of 28% of total malware were found to be the top malware type, the study by PandaLabs researchers showed.

Related article: PandaLabs Report Discusses Movie Trojan and Other Worms

» SPAMfighter News - 2/1/2008