Like James Bond does in his new hit Skyfall, secret agents all over the world are now dealing with cyber-terrorists and digital threats as well as the usual bad guys petting cats on their laps as they hide out in their remote lairs.
Are these new digital threats giving those villains a digital license to kill? This infographic from F-Secure, a company that deals with malware threats, shows us some of the increasingly sophisticated viruses and malware that are insinuating themselves into digital devices across the world.
The scariest part is the fact that many of the good guys, including the U.S., are creating ultra-powerful digital weapons that could end up in the wrong hands. For example, Stuxnet, a sophisticated computer worm developed by the governments of the United States and Israel to target five Iranian organizations, has now been surpassed by even more sophisticated malware.
For instance, right when we were thinking last June that a new and especially nasty malware program called Flame was as bad as viruses could get, the Gauss virus appeared in August, which is said by security firm Kaspersky Lab to be infecting more computers than Flame.
Even though firms such as Kaspersky and F-Secure might sometimes exaggerate the threat of viruses and malware — simply because the more afraid we are those things the more antivirus software they sell — these digital weapons could still pose a threat, not only to individual users but to national security.
Take a look at this infographic outlining several of the current digital threats, and then let us know in the comments about your experiences with viruses and malware. Is the threat exaggerated, with the cure being worse than the disease? Or as U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has suggested, will viruses present us with a “digital Pearl Harbor” unless we sufficiently protect ourselves?