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"Years ago when we started writing checks, we might have been tackling five to 10 a day," says Paul Wood, a senior analyst with Symantec Hosted Services. "It's now well over 10,000 a day and growing." According to McAfee's 2010 Q2 Threat Report, the company identified 10 million pieces of malware in the first half of this year and is tracking close to 45 million in its malware database.

Vulnerability assessment products are also behind the curve, as Greg Ose and Patrick Toomey, both Neohapsis application security consultants, found when they recently set out to measure the relative effectiveness of various vulnerability scanners. "It's a question frequently raised by our customers," Toomey says. "They know the tools aren't going to catch all of the problems, but can they count on them to catch, say, 80% of the bad ones?" What Ose and Toomey discovered was far worse than even they had anticipated. Out of the 1,404 vulnerabilities accounted for by the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project during the sample period, there were only 371 signatures. In the best cases, the tools were in the 20% to 30% effectiveness range.

Toomey's observations are in line with those of security researcher Larry Suto, who earlier this year reported that Web application vulnerability scanners missed almost half (49%) of the vulnerabilities present during his tests.