Cybercriminals are trying to increase their malicious activities, creating more than 20 million new types of malware during the third quarter of the year, which translates to 227,747 new samples per day.
Panda Security researchers conducted a report for the last quarter of the year and found that most of the threats recorded through their systems were Trojans, representing 78.08% of the total number of samples, which is not surprising, because in this category malware includes a multitude of threats, such as backdoors, rootkits, infostealers, malware dowloaders and droppers, ransomware and spyware.
Viruses and worms come in second and third place, accounting for 8.89% and 3.92%, respectively, according to a presentation by PandaLabs Technical Director, Luis Corrons. In terms of infection rates, Trojans were responsible for the most cases, while potentially unwanted programs (PUPs) came in second place, with 14.55%.
Malware distribution rates by country show that China is the first with 49.83%, followed by Peru and Bolivia. According to the report, Europe is the region with the lowest number of infections, with nine of its countries in the top ten safest. Norway and Sweden are in the top 2. Japan is the only Asian country on this list.
However, it is unclear how the measurements were made since we do not know exactly how many customers the company has per region in the world. Smartphone malware has seen a rapid increase, both in number and capabilities.
According to the International Telecommunication Unit, there are approximately 2.3 billion smartphones in the world, making their operating systems an attractive target for cybercriminals.
A report from Kaspersky released in October reveals that most malware is created for Android devices. In the first half of the year, 175,442 new malware programs appeared for this operating system alone. Banking Trojans are the top threat to mobile phones.
