F-Secure: Inside the cage

The antivirus researchers receive 10,000 virus samples per day. "It's a huge endeavour just to go through them all," said Stahlberg.

Malware is often now encrypted in an attempt to evade antivirus detection. However, the malware has to be able to decrypt itself to execute on a system, so the key to decrypt must be embedded in the code. F-Secure malware researchers reverse the assembly code, find the key, find out what the malware does, and then push out an update. Updates to F-Secure antivirus protection are pushed out every six minutes.

F-Secure does not envisage a time when its product will become too unwieldy due to its size. "It's a challenge moving to the future," said Sullivan (pictured above). "We constantly refine our systems settings and memory to make the systems as responsive as possible, and are constantly coming up with more efficient ways of stripping malware."