What next for the anti-virus industry?

The outlook for the anti-virus industry's profits will be promising for a while yet – and it's got the hackers' seemingly ceaseless ingenuity to thank, as the constantly changing nature of malware keeps customers paying for software to keep it at bay.

That's the verdict from consultants Frost and Sullivan, who predict that revenues generated by the anti virus industry will climb from $1.97bn last year to just under $3.98bn by 2007.

The anti-virus boom is being driven by the high-profile nature of many of the attacks of this summer, which have raised awareness of the potentially disastrous results of virus attacks and encouraged IT decision makers to cough up. Even home users, who normally only update their protection when Microsoft bung another OS offering their way, have been beefing up their security.

Virus-writers will start to move towards more underhand uses for their malware, according to Jose Lopez, industry analyst at Frost and Sullivan

"There is...speculation in the marketplace that more sophisticated viruses will be used for commercial espionage. The same is true of malicious mobile code," she said in a statement. "This will add to the press coverage of anti-virus issues and will fuel demand for the products on the market. The increased media reportage of viruses and mobile code threats also makes it much more attractive for copycat attacks to be released."

All of which is good news for the anti-virus industry, which will have to dream up new ways to keep those virus-writers' hands off your PC. One of the developments users should expect to see is sandboxing – where an encrypted virus, which would normally be able to pass through anti-virus software, is contained and dealt with.

The business-driven adoption of multi-platform protection, often at company's desktop, server and gateway levels, will also continue to gain momentum, said the report.