CI pinpoints 200 millionth piece of cloud-based malware

"The good news is that Collective Intelligence (CI), the engine for Internet security created in 2006 by Panda Security's malware research laboratory, recently processed its 200 millionth malware file via the cloud. That's also the bad news.

"CI uses the Internet "community" -- users of Panda's free CloudAntivirus, along with other companies and collaborators -- to locate malware. The company says CI automatically detects, analyzes and classifies more than 73,000 new malware strains that appear every day, ranging from viruses to worms, Trojans, spyware and other attacks. CI now has a database of more than 25 terabytes of cloud-based classification data...

"Unfortunately, the company has reached this milestone because the threats also keep getting faster and more abundant. According to Panda, a third of all the malware in existence was created in the first 10 months of 2010. The average number of threats created daily rose from 55,000 in 2009 to 63,000 in 2010 to 73,000 this year.

"Microsoft reported this past May that one of every 14 downloads from the Internet may contain malware code. Social media -- particularly Facebook -- has become fertile ground for malware attacks."

CSO