It’s not easy making sense of the Internet security landscape; online threats are constantly changing, as cyber thieves adapt their techniques to get ahold of your valuable private information. To help you, our users, to have a better understanding of what the past year has brought in terms of your online security, we took a few specific questions to our Malware Labs team to get the perspective of our analysts here at Lavasoft, and included this Q & A on malware in 2009 in the latest edition of our monthly newsletter.

Here’s an excerpt  –

In general, what type of year has 2009 been in terms of online threats that users are faced with?
“The number of malware samples added to detection in Q1/Q2 of 2009 has increased by 600 percent compared to Q1/Q2 of 2008. The bad guys have been busy.”

What was the biggest challenge that the bad guys presented this past year?

“The sheer volume of malware being produced has been the biggest challenge for us - many samples are repackaged versions of the same thing so we have worked hard on making efficient detection routines for ‘same but different’ malware.
Malware writers, rather than simply releasing one version of their creation into the wild, will make changes to the malware so that while the functionality of it remains the same, it looks like a different file. They then release thousands of essentially the same file into the Internet. Our new detection system in Ad-Aware, Genotype, allows us to look at core attributes of this series of malware - we then create detection routines that allow us to detect all of the files that share the same core attributes.”

You’ll find the full article in the December 2009 issue of the Lavasoft News security newsletter.