Because Windows Defender comes bundled with all new versions of Windows operating systems, no cybersecurity company can ever dream of having a picture of today's malware scene like Microsoft does.
As the year comes to an end, we read security reportto get an idea of what happened on the malware and security front for Windows users in 2019.
According to data collected by Microsoft, the number of detections for ransomware, cryptominers, and malware – as a whole – has decreased this year, compared to the same period last year or even the past two years.
"Some possible reasons for the overall decrease in malware encounter rates in 2018 [and 2019] are the increase in Windows 10 adoption and the increased use of Windows Defender for protection," Microsoft said.
Both Windows 10 and Windows Defender have received significant security improvements over the past five years, improvements that make malware campaigns less effective when targeting modern Windows 10 systems.
According to the table below, Microsoft says that the number of Windows machines detected as malware has decreased from 6-7% of the total Windows ecosystem in early 2017 to 4.15% in October 2019
A similar decline was also observed for cryptominers – malware that specializes in mining cryptocurrency without the user's consent or knowledge – which were particularly popular with scammers in 2017.
According to Microsoft data, this decline began in January 2018, when detections reached 0.3% of all Windows systems, and then slowly declined to a current low of 0.09%, recorded in October 2019.
Ransomware detections also fell in a similar pattern, dropping from a high of 0.11% of all Windows systems in January 2018 to a low of 0.04% in October 2019.
The decline fits with what has been reported elsewhere by many security researchers – that ransomware gangs have abandoned end users (home users, consumers, regular users) and shifted towards enterprise networks, where they can demand higher ransoms than they could from a regular user.
So while detections are down, that doesn't mean ransomware is dead. In fact, ransomware has been a scourge this year for service providers, US schools, US , and, more recently, the European business scene, causing the same massive financial losses but affecting fewer users overall.
The company points out that while the number of malware detections has decreased over the past two years, malicious campaigns have not stopped completely.
According to the Microsoft Security Report, cybercrime gangs have responded by diversifying their “modus operandi,” moving into activities that do not involve the use of malware – such as phishing , DDoS attacks , and credential stuffing.
For example, Microsoft said that the percentage of emails detected as phishing attempts increased from 0.2% in January 2018 to about 0.6% in October 2019, while the size of average TCP-based DDoS attacks increased from 75 Gbps in May to over 200 Gbps in October of this year.
Microsoft has found that more than 44 million users are reusing passwords, putting their respective accounts at risk of hacking through a technique known as credential stuffing.
