Archive notice: This article was originally published on February 27, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
In 2007, Kaspersky Lab registered more new malicious programs than ever before. The antivirus professional’s databases even received more new entries than all the malware recorded during the previous 15 years. Since there are no signs whatsoever that the situation will improve this year, there is cause for serious concern. If the number of viruses continues to rise so rapidly, their total number is likely to double again within a year.
The year 2007 marks the end of “non-commercial” malicious programs. All registered malicious programs had a financial background. The virus epidemics that occurred were all only of short duration and appeared only locally.
The “Storm worm” clearly stands out from the mass of malicious programs newly released in 2007. This malware, classified by Kaspersky Lab as Zhelatin, first appeared in January 2007 and circulated in numerous variants during the course of the year. With Zhelatin, virus programmers successfully implemented numerous malware techniques that until then had circulated only as concepts within the scene. Whether rootkit technologies, code contamination, botnets with camouflage mechanisms or infections of computers through P2P networks – all of this could be achieved with Zhelatin and, in addition, controlled in a decentralised manner.
The most important function of the Storm worm, however, lies elsewhere. The malware is particularly well suited to building botnets and then misusing them to send spam and carry out DoS attacks. These attacks occurred on such a large scale in 2007 that IT security experts dealt with hardly any other subject.
In everyday life, however, users are affected much more heavily by spam than by malicious software. Kaspersky Lab compiles statistics on spam volumes using data from the Russian provider Runet, which can certainly be regarded as representative. An average of 79.2 percent of all Runet emails sent in 2007 were spam. In May of this year, Kaspersky Lab registered the lowest advertising share, at 73.5 percent. By contrast, November, at 86.2 percent, was the advertising-junk month par excellence. Despite individual fluctuations, the share of spam rose steadily, exceeded the 80 percent mark in autumn 2007 and stood at 85.7 percent in the fourth quarter.
Alongside general sections on spam and malicious software, the annual report deals extensively with email threats and malicious programs for online games. The full report can be accessed at http://www.viruslist.de.
