Malware, spam, and phishing pose ongoing threats to small and midsize businesses, requiring constant vigilance to ensure secure computing environments for employees, partners, and customers. By understanding the latest trends in these types of threats, businesses will be better prepared to respond to the problem in the most effective and efficient manner.
IT leaders routinely refer to malware as the No. 1 security threat they face. In terms of volume, they are spot on. By understanding the nature of the threat in detail, businesses will be able to make the right decisions to protect their information assets.
Malware Growing in Leaps and Bounds
Malware -- threats such as viruses, worms, and Trojan horses -- is the most common threat businesses face. Threat counts have increased year over year, but generally at a steady pace. That pace has accelerated rapidly over the last year, however, as shown in the following figure.
Malware occurs in families and variants. This is akin to the genus and species differentiation for living organisms, such that malware family equals "genus" and the variant "species." Traditionally, each malware genus has spawned a moderate number of species. The trend over the last few years has been that the number of species per family has increased. Within the last year, this pattern has evolved to a new level, however, with the number of variants per family increasing radically.
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Creating a variant is a far simpler task than developing a new threat and is the prime motivator for this trend. Though this method of creating malware nets a huge number of problems to be dealt with, it has the side benefit of making each of those problems easier to resolve. It is easier to create a definition file that addresses a variant than it is to create one that addresses a net new threat.
Next Page: Trojans Replace Worms as Primary Problem
