Malware arms race

The register has a rather frightening story about the arms race in the malware industry.

Virus arms race primes malware numbers surge

So the important bit from this story is this paragraph:

The amount of catalogued malware by Panda was 18 million in the 20 years from the firm's foundation until the end of 2008. This figure increased 60 per cent in just seven months to reach 30 million by 31 July 2009.

This sounds utterly amazing, but the really scary part is thinking about the future. Let's say that this trend continues, even at say a 60 percent increase per year (the example given is 7 months).

If there are currently 30 million cataloged pieces of malware, next year there will be 48 million, then 76 million, then 122 million. It's a bit obvious that the trend probably won't grow exponentially, simply because the number of virus writers would probably have to outpace the population of the planet at some point.

Let's assume it grows at a linear rate though, 10 million new viruses per year. As it happened last year, it's likey it'll happen again. That means in 5 years, you're looking at 80 million pieces of malware. One has to wonder if Moore's law can keep up with this.

Right now malware is handled in a reactionary manner. It is going to have to move to a proactive approach, as the reactive race can't be won (as the above numbers show). The scary part about proactive response, is it's a thin line between protecting users and forcing them to only use their hardware device for a specific purpose.