Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content management solutions, has detected its 25 millionth malicious program.

Every year the number of IT threats increases exponentially. Kaspersky Lab recently forecast a ten-fold increase in malicious programs, from 2.2 million in 2007 to 20 million in 2008. However, the rate of growth demonstrated by the cybercrime industry has surpassed even the most exaggerated predictions.

A new modification of Koobface was detected by the specialists at Kaspersky Lab on 9 June and became the 25 millionth malicious program added to the company’s antivirus databases. Net-Worm.Win32.Koobface targets users of the popular social networking sites Facebook and MySpace. This latest version of Koobface confirms earlier predictions by Kaspersky Lab that social networking sites would be the target of more and more IT threats.

The worm uses a simple propagation method: users of social networking sites receive what appears to be a message from a friend containing a link to a video clip on an unknown site. When users attempt to play the video, they are prompted to update Flash Player. Instead of an update, however, a Koobface worm is installed that contains backdoor functionality allowing instructions from a remote management server to be run on the computer.

The proliferation of the Koobface family confirms what Kaspersky Lab has been saying for some time – malicious programs are becoming more and more numerous and they are using increasingly sophisticated technology. The company’s experts correctly predicted back in early 2008 that web fraudsters would be concentrating more of their efforts on social networking sites. It is also evident that the technical concepts behind these new threats are increasingly complex. In order to effectively combat modern malware such as Koobface, an integrated antivirus solution is needed that provides effective multilayered protection.

All consumers using Kaspersky Lab’s personal or corporate products are fully protected against all known versions of Net-Worm.Win32.Koobface.