Kaspersky Labs, a provider of products that protect against viruses, hackers and spam, has said that it is the first anti-virus company to provide scheduled hourly updates.

Before this, the Kaspersky anti-virus database updates have been released every three hours for downloading via the Internet.

According to the company, the number of malicious programs detected by the Kaspersky Anti-Virus databases have increased considerably over the last five years. This is reportedly due to the fact that up to several hundred new viruses appear every day.

Kaspersky says that 63 updates were released in 2000, 205 in 2001, 652 in 2002, 818 in 2003, and this year more than 1,500 anti-virus database updates have already been released. According to estimates from Kaspersky Labs virus analysts, by the end of 2004 at least 5,000 scheduled updates will have been released.


Source : M2 COMMUNICATIONS