SophosLabs director Mark Harris talks about the evolution of malware.
Sophos, a world leader in IT security, today announced that Mark Harris, global director of SophosLabs™, appeared in an eWeek "Onsecurity" podcast with senior writer, Matt Hines. Harris talked about the evolution of the malware industry and why simple virus attacks are still troubling computer users.
Sophos currently protects against over 200,000 threats, and the amount of malware discovered by security experts continues to rise steadily. Rather than developing new, unique pieces of malware, the Sophos expert explains that cyber criminals often tweak existing malware in order to bypass less sophisticated security applications.
"People often think that you would have to be really smart to write malware, but this isn't the case at all, " said Mark Harris, global director of SophosLabs. "The vast majority of the threats we analyze today are variations of malware already in existence. Why do they recycle? Because they don't need to reinvent the wheel: there are enough insufficiently protected computers out there, and on those machines, this stuff works."
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Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.