According to a report from the anitvirus company MessageLabs the market for net crimes is worth up to 250 Billion USD.
IT crime is becoming more and more professional, and has become complicated and specialized net pirate market.
There are tens of thousands participants in these networks, and it is become a professional environment running on business concepts rather than being a boys room activity.
Some of the enviroments are trlyu like shopping centers, were the virus authors and middle men sell and buys everything varying from virus variants, trojans, distribution opportunities, offers of personal information, creditcard details and so on.
According to the report from MessageLAbs, the most active part of the underwold is found in Russia, where members of networks brags about earning 10.000 USD per day to cheat and swindel and blackmail businesses and private persons in USA and Europe.
A special adapted virus variant costs as little as 250 USD, and for around 25 USD a month, you can subscribe on updates that makes the virus undetectable by antivirus software available in the market.
It is as simple to buy distribution through so-called botnets, that are remote controlled networks of infected computers, often in the range of thousands of them. These networks are able to send out millions of spam messages during a very short time.
The amount of viruses increases dramatically. F-Secure reports that last year they put out 250000 new virus signatures in its databases.
That is equally as many as the company put on their database during the period of 1986 up to 2006.
As new virus, trojans and spyware software pops up, antivirus vendors put these signatures in their next update. The problem is that the criminals makes and distributes new variations very fast, most of the times, faster than what the anti virus vendors can update their signature databases.
So if you live in the faith that you are 100% secrured with an updated antivirus software, you are wrong.
Todays developes of destructive and malicious software or malware uses their own test labs and utilize more and more sophisticated techniques to increase their chance to infect computers.
A recent test of security software illustrates that a new destructive sotware easily got through its safety nets. The test shows that the the best antivirus software only caught one out of four new viruses.
As a comparision same type of test in February 2008 caught 50% of the new viruses, so the performance is downgraded, which is bad news.
In this industry compared to others, we have an opponent to relate to, a constant battle is ongoing and the bad guys plys on the surprise element all the time.
Even only 12 hours advantage in this game will lead to thousands of computers being infected and the spread is ongoing straight away. The developers of more malicious software has long time used antivirus software to test their viruses on, and secure that they are ahead of the security companies at all times.
Several netplaces offers users to search through files to check whether they contain viruses. These netplaces like for example VirusTotal.com, offers updated lists from most of the security companies. These web pages are like tailored for developers of viruses. They can send their files for a check out on the web page and see if they are detected or not.
Despite the black hole we are looking into, antivirus software is not a total waste after all. Among the 675.000 trojans, keyloggers and other malicious software almost 98% of them are taken by the best anitvirus software available in the market today.
He has a background as civil engineer and geoscientist. He has worked mainly within the oil and gas industry from the mid 1980s. He has written a few fictional novels as well as being the author of some professional litterature within oil and gas sector, he is now an editor of some web sites.
