Among the creators of malware, fame and
recognition is being replaced by economic motivations;
they create malware to make money, the result being a very large increase in
the number of malware samples released “in the wild”, malware which remains inconspicuously
in computers belonging to unsuspecting users. These computers are then remotely
controlled in order to launch spam from them, plant spyware in other computers
or even to gather authentication credentials stored in those systems. This
situation is leading to a less visible but more dangerous malware outbreak, or “silent epidemic” as we internally refer to it at
Panda Software. This means that there are enormous amounts of new malware out there that users, and even security administrators at companies, are not aware of.

In order to combat this ever changing malware landscape, traditional and reactive AV technologies are not enough to protect users. A new breed of proactive technologies needs to be developed that can tackle the problem at its root and effectively protect users against all new kinds of malware, crimeware, targetted attacks and different crapware emerging on a daily basis.

With this landscape in mind Panda Research was created in 2003 with the sole purpose of researching and developing proactive technologies capable of dealing with this situation. Since then, successful proactive technologies such as TruPrevent Behavioural Analysis and Genetic Heuristic Engines have been developed and deployed to users worldwide, and have proven their success in protecting them from new and unknown malware with close to zero false positives and small resource footprints.

We continue advancing the state of proactive anti-malware technologies and now wish to make these advances available to leading security researchers. Via this Panda Research blog we are opening developer and research access to new ideas, code and technologies. Feel free to try these new technologies out, discuss them with us or simply drop us a note.

Pedro Bustamante
Senior Research Advisor