The 9th IEEE Technically Sponsored International Conference on Malicious and Unwanted Software (MALCON 2014) will be held at the Waldorf Astoria El Conquistador Resort, Fajardo, Puerto Rico, USA, October 28-30th, 2014 (October 30th, 2014 - optional). This year’s conference has adopted as its main theme "The Malware Threat in the Era of Unlimited Computing Power" in recognition of a major paradigm shift that has transformed the computer industry as a whole, and created major challenges to the IT security community in particular. Over the last 12 years, Cloud Computing has become a dominant computing model. Applications and data reside in the “Cloud”, and are accessed via Smartphones and other mobile devices owned and operated by customers, employees, and suppliers no longer part of the traditional enterprise physical network, e.g., “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD). Within this context, three major research trends have emerged. First, at the periphery, the end-point device is a mobile BYOD with security and mobility properties never anticipated. If the end-point device is owned and operated by the employee of a large corporation, and the boundaries between "personal" and "corporate" data, as well as between applications disappears, then what is the protection model that can be used? Is the device to be "trusted", ”untrusted”, or simply operate in different modes of protection, one when interacting in a corporate environment, and one when being used strictly as a personal device? Second, the existence of either a physical or a logical "Trusted Domain" that resides and operates within the confines of a single corporate entity has disappeared. We invite manuscripts exploring new models of protection that do not depend on ownership or management of a Corporate Trusted Domain, and incorporate elements where part of the data, applications, and infrastructure are managed by third parties such as SalesForce.com, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or even the local Starbucks WiFi. Third, reaching consensus on a protection model for the new cloud computing paradigm is an important challenge – especially developing new standards for measuring protection. Do we protect the traffic? the data? the applications? How do we measure protection? In this last area, we clearly understand that measuring how many resident infected files are detected by an anti-malware product is a very limiting and not very useful measure. We encourage authors to propose innovative solutions to this problem, and the set of associate metrics to be used. Finally, while deservedly significant attention has been, and should continue to be devoted to the research areas described above, another critical problem deserves our attention at this juncture, namely the impact of “Big Data” and, now, “Fast Data” on IT security. The virtually unlimited power and speed of computing resources now available enables a cornucopia of new strategies and tactics for both attackers and defenders. For example, algorithms for running higher order correlations over vast arrays of distributed meta-data in near real-time that were previously only theoretical have now become practical. Contributions that explore the implications and uses of this escalation for both attackers and defenders are welcomed.