Watershed in malicious code evolution

Another link from my good friend Kamal. Another link that has been sitting in my inbox for too long ...

I think we'd all agree that the types of threats we're seeing now are changing radically. If we look at the past few years of malware, we see a change in the nature of the threat. One of the things I've noticed is that malware authors seem to be hitting a brick wall in attempting to exploit systems the old fashioned way (ie a buffer overflow) and instead are back to the weakest link - people. Social engineering tricks, such as those used by IM-based malware, and password guessing techniques seem to be popular with some people. Just as popular as ever are mass mailers. But even more popular than ever are client-side exploits that launch a download of some malware to bootstrap itself onto a victim machine. This piece from VirusList is a good set of numbers to infer what's going on and where things are headed.

Accordingly, there has been a watershed in how Kaspersky Lab classifies malware. A professional malware market started to emerge at the very end of 2003, gained ground during 2004, and was well established by the beginning of 2005. Therefore, 2004 could be called the year in which the Internet became comprehensively criminal. Data based on Kaspersky Virus Lab statistics clearly demonstrates this trend. Some of this data is used in the discussion of the malware classifications used by Kaspersky virus analysts which follows.

Source: Watershed in malicious code evolution, from VirusList.