Alexander Gostev, the author of the report and senior virus analyst at Kaspersky Lab, outlines the key malware trends and threats facing today’s information security industry
Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content management solutions, announces the publication of Malware Evolution: January – March 2008. Alexander Gostev, the author of the report and senior virus analyst at Kaspersky Lab, outlines the key malware trends and threats facing today’s information security industry.
The first quarter of 2008 continued to see an increase in the rate at which the number of malicious programs appeared, with thousands of new variants being detected every day. This process is gradually coming to be accompanied by an increased technical sophistication. As before, we are seeing the reincarnation of old ideas and techniques, and the implementation of these in the current landscape brings a whole different level of threat.
Virus writers have even started borrowing certain technologies from the antivirus world to combat antivirus products. The period of technical stagnation on the threat landscape appears to be drawing to a close.
Posing an ever greater threat are the worldwide networks of zombie machines, or botnets, capable of disseminating spam, mounting concerted cyber attacks, as well as numerous other malicious functions.
Yet another threat stems from the vulnerabilities present in popular legitimate software that hackers can exploit to spread malware without the knowledge of the developers. The first quarter of 2008 witnessed a scandal involving the FlashGet download manager, which started spreading Trojan programs after an attack by cyber criminals.
The first three months of the year also brought lots of unpleasant news from the world of mobile devices, with a number of new malicious programs targeting Symbian, Windows Mobile, J2ME and the iPhone.
The full version of Malware Evolution: January – March is available at Viruslist.com. An abridged version can be found at Kaspersky.com.
