Hi malware fighters,
For the first time the amount of new malware on Windows-PC’s has outgrown the legit software. Those are the conclusions of a new security white-paper published by Symantec’s.
The vendor has been counted new software applications during some period of the second half of 2007
H. Out of 54.609 unique applications 65% were malicious. This shift has to do with professional malware production on the one hand, and also with the methodology of Symantec’s. Their sensor technology measures qualitative software application prevalence worldwide.
The majority of unique malicious code applications are being distributed to a number of 5 users or under 5 only. Legit applications are being distributed under thousands of users at a time. This is to show that unwanted or malicious programs are much much more efficient and they will stay that way.
White lists
Symantec speculates that the grow malicious or unwanted programs will further outnumber the total of legit software being launched. That is why security software should start to handle white listing in stead of blacklisting.
At the moment malicious applications are removed, blocked or quarantined because of a black list of signatures: so called blacklisting. But Symantec predicts that security methods should change over at some moment towards white listing to identify a minority of known and certified applications.
But how would you start a proggie that is not malicious, and that you coded by yourself? It would immediately been flagged as unwanted or malware. Or a free tool that you have re-engineered yourself? Is not this another way of getting “trusted computing” aboard, and could not this mean the end of the free Internet?
polonus