Photos: Inside the malware hunters' den

Antivirus company F-Secure's labs in Finland (pictured) are the heart of its operations monitoring and detecting malware activity around the globe.

The company has a response team which uses a variety of monitoring and detection tools to look out for suspicious cyber activity 24 hours a day, in three shifts, running between its offices in Helsinki and Kuala Lumpa.

Sean Sullivan, a technical expert with F-Secure, said the response team in charge of finding and dealing with any cyber attacks has to deal with, on average, 10,000 different samples of malware everyday and this number is "rising exponentially".

The 16-strong Finnish team hunt through reams of code to find malware in it, with automation tools also running to pick out any repetitions within the different pieces of code to prevent staff going over old ground.

Sullivan said cyber criminals are now using "malware factories" to bombard the networks with viruses and spam because they cannot beat the security companies by using complex code anymore.

The team also uses a host of other tools to hunt and identify a variety of cyber threats, including a mobile phone bunker, which they use to see how devices react to viruses, a Google Earth mash-up and a fake IP address to attract and catch fraudsters and infected machines.

Photo credit: Gemma Simpson