The numbers are frightening no matter how you slice them. The scope of the malware problem is readily apparent when you look at the statistics. On December 31, 2007, when McAfee Avert® Labs released its last DAT of the year, the published count of threats detected was 357,820, a 60 percent increase over 2006, when the total threat count was 221,935. Today, the Avert team is receiving a record number of malware samples to analyze—at times, as many as 2,000 per hour.

Just about all the malware we've been seeing is financially motivated and stealthy. Today's organized crime rings know that there's a great deal of money to be made by stealing personal and financial data—social security numbers, credit card numbers, and bank routing numbers. If Al Capone and other racketeers of his ilk were alive today, you can be sure they'd place their bets on cybercrime. And, of course, financial reward inspires and encourages malware writers to develop nastier and harder-to-detect threats and exploits. To make matters worse, most malware now has a brief lifespan—5 to 7 hours—which means that there isn't much time for people to catch on before fraudsters move on to the next exploit.

Let's review some additional figures for 2007:

• 135,885 unique threats were detected by Avert Labs
• 372 new detections per calendar day
• 527 new detections per business day
• One malware driver is written every 4 minutes
• 38 percent of all detections were added this year
• 25,438 more detections were added this year than in 2005 and 2006 combined (Those two years totaled 110,447)

As long as cybercrime remains a lucrative venture, we fully expect to see these trends continue into 2008. New technologies, such as virtualization and radio frequency identification (RFID), will likely open up new attack vectors for criminals to exploit. It's absolutely imperative for security vendors to recognize these trends, so that they can stay one step ahead. At McAfee, Avert Labs is at the forefront of this type of research, and in 2008, we'll be using our findings to develop new ways to protect our customers from the spread of this malware epidemic.