And the company is predicting a miserable 2008, with malware volumes continuing to increase as criminals successfully create a network-based underground ecosystem, trading malware development tools, skills, capabilities and resources.
F-Secure says in its 2007 Data Security Wrap-Up that it has identified a total about 500,000 malware signatures in its cumulative database – compared to 250,000 a year ago. The number of examples of malware had doubled in just one year.
“We've never seen as many samples arrive to our labs,” F-Secure Corporation Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen said.
“We would be unable to handle such huge samples loads if we would not have built a high degree of automation into our malware analysis systems over the past years,” he said.
The company said that while no truly new malware technologies were seen the existing ones were refined and adapted for much greater effectiveness.
Financial transactions remain a favorite target for network crime. The amount of phishing sites continues to increase, but as bank customers have become more aware of this threat the criminals have started employing more sophisticated techniques.
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