Five million new malware samples
In the third quarter of 2011 alone, five million new malware samples were created. In addition, Trojans set a record for becoming the preferred category for cybercriminals to carry out their information theft, representing more than 75 percent of all new malware, according to PandaLabs.
During the months of July, August and September the record of new Trojan samples was broken compared to previous quarters. Three out of four new samples, 76.76 percent, were Trojan Horses, an increase from 68 percent in the previous quarter. With the widespread prevalence of cybercrime, Trojans have always been at the top, but never reached a percentage this high.
Viruses took second place, comprising 12.08 percent of samples (down from the previous month more than 4 points). Worms followed viruses, descending from 11.69 to 6.26 percent in the last quarter.
Interestingly, the growth of new adware samples grew more than 100 percent from 1.37 percent in the second quarter to 3.52 percent in the third, mainly due to the growth of fake antivirus, included in this category.
As recorded by Panda ActiveScan, overall data of malware samples is similar to those recorded in the second quarter. Trojans, viruses and worms again occupied the top three spots with 63.22, 10.11 and 9.74 percent of infections, respectively.
The Top 10 most prevalent malware specimens accounted for 49.97 percent of all infections. However, this figure is somewhat misleading as many of the entries on the list are generic detections (detected by Collective Intelligence) which include several malware families.
In the ranking of the Top 20 countries with the most infections, China once again led this ranking according to Panda’s Collective Intelligence data. Taiwan (50.93) and Turkey (46.68) occupied the second and third place respectively, followed by Russia and Poland.
On the other end of the spectrum, Sweden once again garnered the lowest detection rate with 23.36 percent, followed by the UK, Switzerland and Germany.
The complete report is available here.