There is a new dimension to the struggle between cyber-crime and anti-malware companies - the entire arena has moved to the next stage. So said Eugene Kaspersky, co-founder and CEO of Kaspersky Lab, at an international press tour, in Moscow.
Kaspersky likened this struggle to an arms race; a term he defines via Wikipedia as a competition between two or more parties, for real or apparent supremacy, with each party competing to produce the largest number of weapons or superior technologies.
He said only a tiny minority of cyber-crimes are successfully investigated. These crimes happen on the Internet, with proxy servers in several places, making them almost impossible to handle as there are no national barriers.
In addition, Kaspersky says cyber-crime is an easy and low-risk business. All criminals need is knowledge, a computer and an Internet connection. There is no contact with the victim. "These individuals and syndicates are not transparent businesses; they do not have annual audits. They do not pay taxes, nor do they report their results to the IDC or Gartner; it is impossible to know how much they actually earn."
However, he says crime revenue can be estimated from several sources, including police reports, Kaspersky Lab experts and private talks, and says it is in the region of $100 billion in 2008 alone.
Talking of how many individuals are involved in cyber-crime, he says there are about 2 000 malware families in 2008, with an average number of gang members being 10 individuals. "This adds up to tens of thousands of people in the business, and at a few million US dollars per employee."
He says most cyber-criminals are based in China, Latin America and the Russian-speaking countries.
According to him, these individuals are professional, organised and motivated, resulting in increasingly sophisticated attacks, which in turn place a high load on protection technologies. He adds that these attacks are also stimulated by the financial crisis.
Kaspersky says anti-malware companies collect millions of samples of malicious code every month to process, help analyse, understand and develop protection. "It is no longer possible to process all new malicious samples with old-day manual standards; we are now in an era of automatic malware processing systems."
He says Kaspersky Lab focused on technologies from the beginning, and was the first company to acknowledge the `arms race`. "This is a very interesting space to be in; we play a role, we do it successfully and we enjoy that."
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