Industry overview

Throughout 2004 the security industry spoke of increasing threats - malicious code is becoming increasingly problematic to the industry, and most predict the same for the future.

But the threat is fundamentally changing forever and that is being driven by increasing criminal involvement in cyber crime. These threats are developed to extort, to spam, to perform DDoS attacks and related activities - rather than simply spread.

There are more threats out there today - but today's risk assessment provided by the AV community is principally based on the number of reported infections - not the actual impact of being infected.

Risk is NOT the number of samples sent into an anti virus vendor. It is directly related to the potential impact it poses to the customer.

With so much activity in the IT security space, security officers have a lot of work to undertake, they need assistance in understanding what risks are posed to their organisation - not the Perceived Risk for the 'average Joe'.