The year of 2008 saw vast sums of money made by cyber criminals statistics now show. Sophos said over 20,000 new programs every day that cause harm to PC's were being created. Symantec reports that 2008 it has to protect against 1 million viruses.


The most targeted operating system, of course , is Windows PC's due to it being the most popular but the last few years has seen more virii than ever before. The trend has moved from infected emails to infected websites where just by browsing or visiting a harmful website causes malicious code to infect your PC.

Innovation in virus creation continues at a pace that is startling security experts such as the Mebroot virus will report bac when it is detected so that the virus cerators can continue to alter the virus avoiding detection.

Another trend in malicious software has been the upsurge in bogus secuirty software that tricks unwary customers to pay for software that is itself a virus and disbles all elements of security allowing for attacks on peoples PC's and confidential data to go unabated.

There has been some small consolation against in the war against cyber criminals with ISP's taking action to shut down the heart of a spam network. The major problem that still exists is that the criminals move quickly around the world dismantling and setting up somewhere else before law enforcement agencies even have time to react.