the malware plateau

i'm sure the title of this posts makes it pretty clear i'm referring to findings recently posted on the mcafee blog by toralv dirro that show that malware growth is slowing... matt hines has also written about it wondering and postulating about what might be going on...

while it still may be too early to tell exactly what's going on, the very idea that it might be even just temporarily slowing down has brought to mind an interesting train of thought:

exponential growth (in anything) is not sustainable indefinitely

there's no question that the set of all malware has undergone incredible growth in numbers over the past several years... just as unquestionable, though, is the fact that the resources being consumed in order to affect the apparent exponential growth in malware numbers are themselves either fixed or growing at a significantly less than exponential rate... by resources, i'm not just talking about money (though that certainly is part of the equation) but also man power, time, the pool of susceptible marks, etc...

reaching a point of equilibrium was a foregone conclusion... even if this isn't that point, a plateau like this is inevitable...