Pandalabs Revealed that Q3 Spike Sees 20 Million New Malware Strains

Pandalabs in its third quarterly report for Q3-2014 revealed that cybercriminals have taken the fast lane to steal and rob by creating over 20 million fresh strains of malware during third quarter of the year which means 227,747 new samples per day.

Most of these do not pose any risk to users due to reputed antivirus application guarding their computer but the total number of malicious items being introduced on a daily basis is overwhelming.

Security researchers of Pandalabs found that during the last quarter, most of the threats recorded were trojans which accounted 78.08% of the total number of samples which was not a surprise at all as this category of malware constitutes maximum threats ranging from rootkits, backdoors, malware downloaders, infostealers and droppers to spyware and ransomware.

Softpedia.com published news on 1st November, 2014 quoting Luis Corrons, Technical Director of Pandalabs, as saying "Viruses and worms come in second and third position accounting for 8.89% and 3.92% respectively."

Pandalabs added that regarding infections, trojans once again took the first position constituting 75% of the total which is up from 63% during the previous quarter.

Potentially unwanted programs (PUPs) were in second position consisting 14.5% of infections which is less than second quarter figure of 25%. Next in place is adware/spyware (7%) followed by worms (2%) and viruses (1.5%).

Betanews.com published a report on 6th November, 2014 quoting Corrons as saying "during these last months, we have seen how cyber-crime has grown. Criminals have not stopped to create malware to infect as many systems as possible to gain access to sensitive or confidential information."

With reference to the data across different countries, it is not surprising to find that China has the highest infection rates with 49.83% followed by Peru (42.38%) and Bolivia (42.12%).

Panda claimed that Latin American and Asian countries dominated the rankings of nations with the most infections and Europe had the least with nine in the top ten most 'secure' countries.

Pandalabs added that Norway led the list with an infection rate only 23% followed by Sweden (23.4%) and Japan (24%) which was the only non-European country in that top ten.

» SPAMfighter News - 11/14/2014