Malware vs Virus

Until recently, Viruses have dominated the landscape of enterprise security, bringing the nasty notoriety-seeking virus writers to the forefront of our imagination. Solitary individuals seeking bragging rights and fame when able to cause panic and hysteria on a widespread basis. Crippling networks across this country and across the world, and laughing wildly as it all unfolds. But to what end? Financial gain? No. A resume builder? Certainly not. It was and still is to some degree for the pure fun of it. The "I told you so" factor. But a shift has been made.

Spyware now accounts for more than 75% of the malicious code being set free to damage our precious cargo of zeroes and ones. Spyware does promise financial gain to its originators. Be it a clever marketing scheme or outright ID theft, Spyware has absolutely taken the place of traditional viruses in the age of XP and Vista.

AV vendors have attempted to address this shift by offering 'add-ons' and 'snap-ins' to their traditional AV engines, and some have come close to par in this race. But by and large the third party Anti-Spyware vendors are light-years ahead of the AV offerings in the scanning, database and active protection areas of combating these latest 'blended threats'.