This year has seen a significant spike in fake anti-virus proliferation, to the extent that 40 per cent of rogueware was created in 2010.
So says Panda Security, which has been tracking fake anti-virus threats for four years and has detected 5,651,786 unique rogueware strains in that time. Of those, 2,285,629 appeared between January and October 2010.
Furthermore, 11.6 per cent of all computer threats gathered over the last 21 years were rogueware, while 5.4 per cent of computers today have been infected with fake anti-virus.
Given the threat has been around for a relatively short amount of time, the progression of fake anti-virus has been astonishing, Panda said.
Criminals have earned a significant amount of money from these projects, with software authors making over 21 million a month or around 260 million a year overall, according to Panda figures.
"The rogueware situation is very serious and growing as cyber criminals continue to create new methods for developing and distributing malware, with social networks proving to be an effective channel to infect users," said Luis Corrons, technical director at PandaLabs.
"In order to fight the war against cyber crime, grassroots awareness, advocacy and individual user education will continue to be important. Anti-virus companies must play a fundamental role in exposing the problem in near real-time and presenting solutions along the way."
At the most recent count, hackers behind the SystemGuard2009 software were the most successful rogueware pushers, with 12.51 per cent of all fake anti-virus infections perpetrated by that version.
MSAntiSpyware2009 was in second on 11.67 per cent, while MalwareDoctor was third on 8.14 per cent.
This week is Get Safe Online Week and organisers warned on Monday about cold callers offering fake anti-virus software.
Research from the campaigners found one in four British adults had been contacted by criminal gangs trying to flog fake IT security services.
Tom Gaffney, UK security advisor for F-Secure, said Britain was comparatively bad at spreading the message about problems like fake anti-virus.
"If we were in France or Germany we would know about [threats] straightaway," Gaffney told IT PRO.
"In the UK we are a bit more laissez-faire."
As for how to curb the proliferation of rogueware, Gaffney suggested the security industry needs to be more careful with how it markets products.
"It has been easy for some hackers to clone vendors' offerings," the security expert added.
"From a user's perspective it is pretty simple: they have got to purchase from a reliable vendor."
