There are many millions of new malicious programs every year. In 2007, two million were known, while in 2008 this figure surged to 18 million. This year, there are around 33 million unique samples of malware.
So says Nikolay Grebennikov, CTO of Kaspersky Lab. “It is not only about quantity, also about quality. In 1990, we had viruses through file media. The year 2000 and beyond saw worms being spread through e-mail. From 2005 onwards, we saw Web pages infected through Trojans.”
In addition, he says there are new vulnerable devices every day. Any device that connects to the Internet and has an operating system is vulnerable. “There are also new distribution methods, and technologies such as Web 2.0 drive new methods. The outlook is not good. Cyber crime is extremely profitable, and not too difficult to accomplish. Cyber terrorism is on its way, and espionage is already a reality and we will see more and more cases in the future. All threats are financially motivated these days.”
In order to solve these problems, he says people need to be educated, processes need to be established, there must be co-operation between law enforcement and governments and, lastly, technology needs to keep up with the threats.
“Unfortunately, at present technology is the only solution that can really help against current threats.” He says Kaspersky Lab's technology uses several elements: black, white and grey listing; in the cloud protection; sandbox technology; and multiple data correlation.
He says, at present, Kaspersky Lab has around 100 million files in its reputation database. “This is broken down into 67 million trusted files, and 33 million malware files. We receive 2.5 million files every week, and prevent 20 million infections every month through this database.”
Grebennikov says core to Kaspersky Lab's technology vision is development of solutions, products and services to protect all modern digital systems and devices against IT threats. Kaspersky will do this, he says, through its advanced expertise and innovative technologies developed by its international team of IT security and software design experts.
The company's strategy is to have the widest set of technologies for endpoint, gateway, mobile, hosted, in the cloud solutions, for all markets, from consumer to enterprise to government. “We aim to cover all IT risks, from external threats such as malware, spam, unauthorised access, phishing and similar; to the internal threats such as sabotage and data leakage.”
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