Rise in malware variants make antivirus solutions insufficient

Antivirus solutions are not enough for enterprises with the rise of threats and the explosion of unique malware variants in 2009.

According to Symantec 'Predictions for 2010', the industry is quickly realising that traditional approaches to antivirus, both file signatures and heuristic/behavioural capabilities, are not enough to protect against today's threats.

"We have reached an inflection point where new malicious programs are actually being created at a higher rate than good programs. As such, we have also reached a point where it no longer makes sense to focus solely on analysing malware. Instead, approaches to security that look to ways to include all software files, such as reputation-based security, will become key in 2010," it added.

Social engineering is another platform being used by attackers to directly target the end user. Users are being tricked to download malware or divulging sensitive information under the auspice that they are doing something perfectly innocent. Social engineering's popularity is at least in part spurred by the fact that what operating system and web browser rests on a user's computer is largely irrelevant, as it is the actual user being targeted, not necessarily vulnerabilities on the machine. Social engineering is already one of the primary attack vectors being used today, and Symantec estimates that the number of attempted attacks using social engineering techniques is sure to increase in 2010.

In 2010, consumers can expect to see the propagators of rogue security software scams take their efforts to the next level, even by hijacking users' computers, rendering them useless and holding them for ransom. A less drastic next step, however, would be software that is not explicitly malicious, but dubious at best.

With the popularity of social networking sites poised for another year of unprecedented growth, expect to see fraud being leveraged against site users to grow. In the same vein, expect owners of these sites to create more proactive measures to address these threats. As this occurs, and as these sites more readily provide third-party developer access to their APIs, attackers will likely turn to vulnerabilities in third-party applications for users' social networking accounts, just as we have seen attackers leverage browser plug-ins more as Web browsers themselves become more secure.

Microsoft has already released the first security patches for the new operating system.

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