Kaspersky rolls out global Interactive Cyberthreat Map

The security company Kaspersky Lab has reportedly released an interactive cyberthreat map that visualizes cybersecurity incidents occurring worldwide in real time. The types of threats displayed include malicious objects detected during on-access and on-demand scans, email and web antivirus detections, as well as objects identified by vulnerability and intrusion detection subsystems.

Internal KSN mechanisms summarize the data sent automatically from thousands of protected devices whose users consented to share information about any suspicious programs they encounter. After comparing the behaviour of the file on different computers, checking it against a database of hundreds of thousands of legitimate applications and using heuristic algorithms, the system issues a preliminary verdict on whether or not the object is malicious. If it is malicious, access to the object is promptly blocked for all other Kaspersky Lab users, thus preventing an epidemic. KSN possesses the very latest information about security incidents which are added to a map of the world in real time so that anyone can view the wide variety of threats, and the speed at which they spread.

"Every day, Kaspersky Lab handles more than 300,000 malicious objects. Three years ago, the figure was just 70,000 but antivirus technologies have also changed with the times and we have no problem coping with this huge stream of traffic,” commented Denis Zenkin, Head of Corporate Communications, Kaspersky Lab.

Users can rotate the globe and zoom in to any part of the world to get a closer look at the local threat landscape. Different types of threats detected in real time are marked with different colours. The user can bring a description of each threat up on the screen or disable the display of threat types. In addition to share buttons for users of social networking sites, there are buttons to switch: the background colour, the language interface and the display mode (flat map or rotating globe). There is also a handy link to check if a computer is infected with malicious software.