Kaspersky Lab patents advanced technology for combating malware epidemics

Kaspersky Lab has successfully patented a groundbreaking piece of technology in the USA that allows the potential scale of malware epidemics to be accurately predicted in order to prevent them from spreading.

Today’s malware has the capacity to spread like wildfire, with millions of computers infected in an instant as an epidemic sweeps across the Internet. This can take down huge swathes of infrastructure, bringing information highways to a standstill and leaving systems vulnerable to data leakage, which in turn opens the door to large scale fraud. Detecting malware on every computer that is infected during an epidemic has little or no effect. What is needed is a reliable method for estimating the potential scale and direction of an epidemic, an early warning system, which is exactly what the new technology developed by Kaspersky Lab’s Yury Mashevsky, Yury Namestnikov, Nikolay Denishchenko and Pavel Zelensky, is capable of doing. The technology was granted Patent No. 7743419 by the US Patent and Trademark Office on 22 June, 2010.