In comparison to 2005, there were no major changes in the volume of spam in 2006. It seems as though spam has reached a saturation point at about 70 - 80% of all email traffic; if this figure increases any further, the situation could become critical. The balance is very fragile and could be disrupted at any moment.

Recently, Jim Allchin, Co-President of Microsoft's Platforms & Services Division ended up in a tight spot. Journalists misinterpreted a phrase from an interview he gave, fuelling a potential scandal. According to the media, Vista is so secure that users will no longer require additional antivirus protection. However, it all turned out to be a storm in a teacup. Jim Allchin apologized for his lack of clarity and explained that he had been misrepresented. In his words, although he believes that Vista is the most secure operating system Microsoft has developed to date, it will not provide complete protection against viruses and other malware.

This article only deals with ‘standard' antivirus solutions: for home computers, workstations, corporate file and mail servers. Arguably, antivirus solutions for smartphones could be included in this list examine. Virus attacks targeting mobile phones may not be particularly common at the moment but the situation is likely to change radically - for the worse, naturally - in the next few years. This article does not examine at hardware solutions (such as gateways, routers with integrated virus scanning capability), or solutions for large UNIX systems. Nor does it cover other antivirus filters which are dedicated to specific tasks.

It's difficult to say exactly how widespread criminal activity is. I think that there are dozens, if not hundreds of hacker groups and individual hackers active in the computer underground. The hackers who belong to groups can probably be numbered in the thousands - this is according to the law enforcement agencies of most computerized countries. Over the last few years several dozen hackers and hacker groups have been arrested, and the total number of arrests topped several hundred. However, this doesn' t seem to have had any real effect on the number of viruses and Trojans.

"Malware", short for malicious software, is an umbrella term that refers to any software program deliberately created to perform an unauthorized and often harmful action. It is a simple combination of two words created to allow people to talk about viruses and all other forms of malicious software in a general manner.

No operating system or application is vulnerable to malicious programs unless external programs, no matter how simple, can be launched. If an external program, even the simplest, can be launched within an operating system or application, then it will be vulnerable to malicious programs. Most contemporary operating systems and applications need to work with other programs, so they do end up being vulnerable. Potentially vulnerable OS and applications include: All popular desktop operating systems Most office applications Most graphical editors Project applications Any applications with in-built script language

Virus writers belong to one of four broad groups: cyber-vandals, who can be divided into two categories, and more serious programmers, who can again be split into two groups.

The trends in virusology that we observe today have their primary roots in the second half of 2003. Internet worms Lovesan, Sobig, Swen and Sober all not only caused global epidemics, but alos profoundly changed the malware landscape. Each of these malicious programs set new standards for virus writers. Once a piece of malware which uses fundamentally new techniques to propagate or infect victim machines appears, virus writers are quick to adopt the new approach. Today's new threats all incorporate characteristics of Lovesan, Sobig, Swen or Sober. Therefore, in order to understand what virus writers are doing currently, and to predict what the future may bring, we need to examine this quartet of worms carefully.

Malicious programs can be divided into the following groups: worms, viruses, Trojans, hacker utilities and other malware. All of these are designed to damage the infected machine or other networked machines.

Malicious software may seem like a relatively new concept. The epidemics of the past few years have introduced the majority of computer users to viruses, worms and Trojans - usually because their computers were attacked. The media has also played a role, reporting more and more frequently on the latest cyber threats and virus writer arrests.