A new Symantec report on the state of malware detected in May reports that cybercriminals were very active, creating approximately 44,500,000 new malware variants.
The outrageous number represents an increase of more than 50% compared to the previous month, when the company's system recorded 29,200,000 new threats.
The month with the second largest number of malware is considered by Symantec systems to be March, when the total number of threats reaches 35,800,000 samples.
Since the beginning of the year, the months with the lowest activity in new malware creation were February (perhaps because it has fewer days), with 26.5 million, and April.
According to the company's data, the most frequently detected threat for OS X is a Trojan called OSX.RSPlug.A, which changes DNS settings on the infected computer and redirects traffic to websites controlled by the attacker. The detection rate increased to 23.9% in May, up from 4%.
The second and third most frequently encountered threats to the OS X environment are Keylogger, at 14%, and Wirelurker, at 9%.
Symantec's report also reports that the number of spear-phishing attacks it detected is on a downward trend.
However, it was observed that attacks using this tactic were more focused on organizations employing fewer than 250 employees, 42.5% of spear-phishing attacks in May were aimed at such businesses or organizations.
The type of file attachments found in most malicious emails were DOC and DOCX files, Windows Word files. These represented 40% of the total.
