Nearly one-third of all Malware created in 2010

by Steve Ragan - Nov 23 2010, 19:43

On Wednesday, Panda Security plans to release information collected by its anti-Malware labs stating that nearly one-third of all known Malware was created in the first 10 months of 2010. In addition, the report goes on to add that, in total, more Malware has already been created this year than in all of 2009.

Panda’s anti-Malware labs are spread out across the globe to form the backbone of its Collective Intelligence network. It’s from these nodes that engineers are able to track and monitor the lifecycle of Malware.

According to the report, Panda identified 134 million separate files, 60 million of which were Malware. Of that, 34 percent of all the active threats were created in the first 10 months of 2010. So far this year, there have been 20 million new threats detected by Panda, which is the same total detected during the whole of 2009.

Moreover, the report says that the average number of threats created daily, including new Malware and variants of existing families, has risen from 55,000 in 2009 to 63,000 in 2010.

The reason for the growth, which is just under 15 percent, is due to the shortened lifecycle for the typical threat. Criminals have been forced into a corner, creating new variants and payloads just to beat the clock, as the average lifespan of a piece of Malware is just 24 hours in some cases.

As vendors such as Panda, Symantec, Trend Micro, and McAfee are able to use global networks to detect, process, and mitigate new Malware, the criminals have to react just as quickly.

It is entirely common to see a strain of Malware designed and deployed in order to infect a small number of systems, only to be replaced by a new version the following day.

Panda’s Sean-Paul Correll, who spoke with The Tech Herald about the report, mentioned that, at one point, the criminals behind the Mariposa botnet would need to release updated binaries four or five times a day to keep up with detection rates.

“Since 2003, new threats have increased at a rate of 100 percent or more. Yet so far in 2010, purely new malware has increased by only 50 percent, significantly less than the historical norm,” Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs commented in a statement.

“This doesn’t mean that there are fewer threats or that the cyber-crime market is shrinking. On the contrary, it continues to expand... It seems [criminals] are applying economies of scale, reusing old malicious code or prioritizing the distribution of existing threats over the creation new ones,” he added.

These Malware figures come just a week after Panda examined the state of Rogue anti-Virus software. According to that study, 40 percent of all Rogue anti-Virus applications were created in 2010. When you compare the Rogue anti-Virus counts with the malicious samples overall, fake anti-Virus software accounts for 11.6 percent of all Malware.

Since the detection of the first Rogue anti-Virus in 2006, there have been 5,651,786 unique variants detected. Of that number, some 2,285,629 of them were created between January and October of this year.

According to Panda, 46.8 percent of all computers worldwide have become infected with some sort of Malware. Of those, 5.4 percent were infected with Rogue anti-Virus.

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