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EMSI, who is the creator of the great free malware detection and cleaning program (also part of our recommended programs section), a-squared FREE, posts their Malware Annual Report for 2007.

In the last year, Emsi Software registered more new types of Malware than ever before. The famous Moore’s Law, which predicts a doubling of PC performance every 24 months, also seems to apply to the Malware sector. However, in this case the number of new dangers doubles in less than 12 months

Data and facts - Every PC infected 8 times

The signature inventory of pests recognized by a-squared Free and a-squared Anti-Malware had somewhat more than 500,000 entries at the beginning of last year. At the beginning of 2008 this has already reached a record of 1.1 million Malware signatures. Very few Anti-Spyware and Anti-Trojan products can keep up with us at this level. The number of reported infected PCs also rose accordingly, from 180,000 in 2006 to over 250,000 in 2007. Whereas 1.4 million Malware infections were reported by a-squared users in 2006, this rose to an unbelievable figure of 1.9 million last year. The shocking fact is: on average, every PC was infected with 8 different types of Malware!

Malware tendencies - Big money

Although most of the reported Malware came from the Spyware and Adware area, 2007 clearly showed a continuation of the trend towards professional Trojans. Malware is no longer being built for self promotion purposes, or for fun, but rather with the primary aim of earning large amounts of money. Most of the newly discovered Worms, Bots and Trojans no longer contain destructive routines. They are purely designed for the purpose of hijacking computers to allow them to be remote controlled. The computing power obtained in this way is generally known on the black market as so-called Botnets. Spammers use this computing power to anonymously send millions of Spam emails. Other shadowy organizations use the storage capacity to store and distribute illegal data such as child pornography or similar. As the victim, you usually do not notice that your computer is being used as a trading place for this type of data. The only clear indications are usually only an Internet connection that becomes continuously slower and less computer performance for your own applications.

A preview of 2008 - Behavioral analysis will become more important

It can be expected that new variants of pest programs will appear more and more quickly. It is becoming increasingly clear that the technical approach of using purely signature-based recognition is reaching a feasibility limit, it will no longer be feasible to analyze the sheer volume of Malware. Emsi Software recognized this trend many years ago and has therefore specialized in behavior based Malware blocking. Behavior Blockers will become increasingly important in the future because permanent monitoring of all actions performed by software is the only effective way of recognizing new Malware. Emsi Software will increasingly expand this segment in the a-squared Anti-Malware and Mamutu products this year.

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Posted under Security, Software