Malware Authors Crank Engines, Reach 20 Million Mark in 2010

Malware authors have been very busy this year. How busy? According to Panda Security, 20 million new strains of malware have already been created this year – the same total as in all of 2009. The shortened lifespan of the malware combined with the increased number of variants demonstrate a shift in the cyber-crime landscape, where many variants are now being created to infect a small number of systems before they disappear, the vendor said.

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

“This doesn’t mean that there are fewer threats or that the cyber-crime market is shrinking,” he said. “On the contrary, it continues to expand, and by the end of 2010 we will have logged more new threats in Collective Intelligence than in 2009. It seems hackers are applying economies of scale, reusing old malicious code or prioritizing the distribution of existing threats over the creation of new ones.”