Marie JonesIf you felt under attack from online viruses this year, there is a good reason for it. Authors of computer viruses, worms, trojans and other threats have had a busy year with more threats created during the first 10 months of this year than the whole of 2009, according to Panda Security’s PandaLabs research unit.
The firm said that between January and October this year, hackers created 20 million new variants, with the average number of threats received every day by PandaLabs rising from 55,000 last year to 63,000 in 2010. To put it another way, 34 percent of all malware ever created is new.
However, the firm said that it may also mean that there are more amateur hackers at work.
Research collected by the PandaLabs Collective Intelligence database shows that although more malicious software is being created, their lifespan is shorter. 54 percent of malware samples are active for just 24 hours, as opposed to previous threats which hung around for several months.
Luis Corrons, Technical Director of PandaLabs, said: “Hackers are applying economies of scale, reusing old malicious code or prioritising the distribution of existing threats over the creation new ones.”
As antivirus solutions become able to detect new malware, hackers modify them or create new ones in order to evade detection.
Corrons, continued: “This doesn’t mean that there are fewer threats or that the cyber-crime market is shrinking. Quite the opposite; it continues to expand, and by the end of 2010 we will have logged more new threats in Collective Intelligence than in 2009.”