Europol recently ranked ransomware as “the most significant malware threat.” But is that really the case? If we look at the data realistically, ransomware appears to be a marginal risk.
Despite the chaos caused by the recent WannaCry and NotPetya, these file-encrypting programs are part of a family of malware that globally accounted for less than one percent of the 600 million unique malware programs released for the Windows platform in 2016.
AV -Test argues (PDF) that 2016 was wrongly called “the year of ransomware” and that it earned this title due to the damage it caused and the malware’s mode of action, which targets organizations or can spread indiscriminately on a global scale.
However, it notes that the fourth most widespread malware family in 2016 was the Virlock file-encrypting ransomware. As Microsoft states in a recent report, around half a billion ransomware emails are sent to Windows systems every quarter.
The share of banking trojans reaches 2.74% of all malware, but the damage they caused is very difficult to record, due to their nature: for example, attacks on the SWIFT.
Overall, there was a 15% decrease in new malware developed for Windows in 2016 compared to 2015, suggesting a slowdown in new threats. Windows malware accounts for 70% of all malware out of the 640 million samples collected by AV-Test. Android malware accounts for 5.6%.
Threats to Linux systems, such as the Mirai malware, increased by 300% in 2016, while malware for macOS increased by 370%, from 819 different malware threats to 3,033. Most of these macOS threats are considered “potentially unwanted software.”
The number of new malicious apps for Android in 2016 reached four million, or doubled since 2015. Most of these threats are trojan apps.
Ransomware for Android remained a secondary threat at 0.22% of all Android malware, which totaled 8,822, compared to 12,521 last year.
