The age of the individual virus writers compiling code for intellectual or malicious reasons is almost past as they are teaming up with spammers in order to make money, says Sophos international sales manager Nimmity Zappert.
"As they increasingly look to make money out of their activities, this becomes more of a criminal activity with more organised crime gangs becoming involved in the development and distribution of malware," she says.
Zappert spoke to ITWeb today during a visit to Cape Town with the local Sophos agent Netxactics.
She describes the new generation of virus writers as becoming mercenary in their behaviour. "They definitely want to make money out of what they are doing."
She says large widespread virus attacks are decreasing, but the purveyors of such software are becoming increasingly targeted, such as either aiming for a specific type of operating system, or network or organisation in order to extract as much profit as possible out of their activities.
"The time of the lonely teenager writing a virus package is almost past. Now we are seeing far more organisation coming into play in a financial exercise," she says.
Gartner analyst, Marcus Blosch, recently said large-scale virus attacks had decreased over the past year, but he warned that security had to stay close to the top of chief information officers' agendas for 2006.
"In the 2003/04 year we saw about 33 large attacks reported worldwide; however, last year we only saw three. This means there is a more concentrated effort going into security breaches," he said.
Brett Myroff, MD of Netxactics, says South African companies are beginning to include upgrades to their security systems into IT budgets.
"The purchase of security systems and upgrading them is becoming less of a grudge purchase and more seen as an operational necessity," he says.
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