Unknown Threats to Your PC
Next Generation Malware Can Have Thousands of Variants
Every day new malware variants are proliferating at alarming rates due to program obfuscation. Program obfuscation transforms code by inserting new code or modifying the existing code to make understanding and detection harder, while still preserving the malicious behavior.
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Malware writers of the “Storm Worm”, for example, created a massive number of slightly different copies of the program to flood the Internet. On the first day that the worm appeared, more than 350 different variants were released. By the fourth day, this number had swelled to 7,300. By the end of the month, 54,000 variants had infected the Internet!
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Effectiveness of Signature-Based Anti-Malware is Rapidly Declining
This rising tide of unknown threats poses a special challenge to modern malware detectors. Although variants of the same threat may exhibit the same basic behavior, each of the many variants possess very different patterns of instructions (signatures) and thus appear to be an unknown threat from the standpoint of traditional signature-based methods of detection.