Half of the 37,000 new viruses, worms, Trojans, and other security threats that appear each day are short-lived. Panda Security, a cloud security company, says that PandaLabs, the company’s laboratory for detecting and analyzing malware, has discovered that 52% of new viruses last only 24 hours.
After that timeframe, it says, they become inactive and harmless as they are replaced by other, new variants that join the list of new specimens in circulation.
The reason for this lies in hackers’ motivation to profit financially from malware and the goal of ensuring their creations go unnoticed by users and security solution vendors.
Just 24 hours after hackers put any strain of malware into circulation, they will modify its code so that malware can continue to spread without being detected by security companies.
This explains the significant increase in the number of new threats detected by PandaLabs. In 2008, PandaLabs recorded a total of 18 million malware samples the company had received in its 20 year history. Since last year, the number of malware has increased dramatically to 30 million through July 31, 2009, according to the company.
“This is a never-ending race which, unfortunately, the hackers are still winning. We have to wait until we get hold of the malware they have created to be able to analyze, classify, and combat it,” said Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs.