Fighting malware and spam

What's next - prediciting the future by looking at the past

Alex Shipp MessageLabs

There are very few viruses that are truly innovative - most build in some way on viruses that have gone before. This gives heuristic anti-virus software a very good chance of catching new viruses, if they can recognise the code or techniques that have been used before.

This paper looks at some of the techniques MessageLabs uses to follow trends in virus writing. By analysing real-world data, it is possible to predict what is likely to happen in the future, and allocate appropriate resources to investigate possible detection strategies.