Reports suggest that there were five times as many malicious programs on the net in 2007 than in 2006. AV, a security software testing organisation saw over 5 million unique programs compared with under a million for 2006.

AV Test reached its total by analysing malicious programs and generating a digital fingerprint for each unique sample.

New Techniques

To combat the increasing problem, security firms are using new techniques, such as:

• Heuristics
• Rules of thumb
• Behaviour blockers

But as the slimy criminal programmers are adjusting their code daily, even hourly, the security firms have to follow suit and have teams dedicated to monitoring the newest, nastiest code to keep their anti-virus programs up to date - this is why you should always set your anti-virus programs to automatically update, and scan frequently.

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