Platinum Product Test Report Kaspersky Lab Anti ... - West Coast Labs

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Kaspersky Lab Product Performance Validation Testing & Certification Changing Malware Threats in Corporate Networks The evolution of Malware, Security Technologies and Services By Lysa Myers, director of research, West Coast Labs. There are few who are unaware of the malware landscape changing since the release of the first few viruses decades ago. But it seems there are just as few people outside the computer security industry who understand the nature of that change. No longer is malware as ethereal a threat as an urban legend, and no longer is the virus outbreak of the day making the evening news. Threats now come not by ones and twos but by the many tens of thousands each day with the known total hovering in the tens of millions. And threats come quietly, remaining as far below the radar as possible to maximize their stay on an affected machine. Corporations are now victims of targeted attacks, as well as the regular masses of malware and have specific needs for the protection of corporate information assets. While malware activity has increased, security budgets certainly have not. Many corporate security staff find themselves facing a tidal wave of new threats without extra personnel or resources. They need security software to work faster, harder and require less manual interaction while providing detailed reports as to what actions have been taken. Machines which are infected need to be cleaned completely so as to get systems back up and running quickly and painlessly. Anti-Malware software is only as good as its research and support departments. They are vital in order to have excellent response times to new threats and to provide top-notch customer assistance. As focus in corporate networks shifts away from the desktop, into mobile, cloud and virtual computing resources, security software needs to protect these environments too. Page 4 of 40
Kaspersky Lab Product Performance Validation Testing & Certification Changing Malware Threats in Corporate Networks The way malware spreads has also changed – there is less concern for infecting oneself with a floppy disk (how many of us even have a floppy disk drive now) or via poorly worded and spelled mass-mailer viruses. When malware authors discovered there was profit to be had in spreading their malicious wares, they began to take many of the tactics used by Search Engine Optimizers and improved their social engineering craft, placing files where people were most likely to run across them. Consequently, the Web is now where the majority of people become infected with malware and, given the extent to which the internet is such an integral part of all corporations’ business activities, the Web is a potent threat vector. Company’s websites are regularly targeted for defacement or infected to spread malware to the site’s visitors. Given that the Internet is operating system agnostic and because current scripting languages allow for queries of the specific browser version of each visitor, malware can be spread which in a manner which infects any particular visit. In the last few years, this has been a tactic which has proved increasingly popular with malware authors, increasing their reach as the market share of new technology increases. Obviously, anti-malware products had to change with the times as the onslaught of malware has increased and the tactics of malware authors has shifted. The first antimalware products were designed strictly as signature scanners, which only ran when a user specifically initiated a scan. In short order, this was changed to allow the scanner to run continuously in the background so that each file was examined as it was accessed, without users having to think about it. This approach has become more widespread over time, so that products require little interaction – users can automatically have the most up-to-date protection running at all times. Page 5 of 40
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