Cybercriminals are releasing lots of of 1000’s of recent malware strains every single day, with an enormous proportion solely concentrating on Home windows customers, a brand new report has claimed.

Researchers from Atlas VPN utilizing statistics printed by AV-TEST GmbH concluded that within the first three quarters of 2022, there had been a complete of 62.29 million new malware pattern detections, or roughly 228,164 new variants every single day.

Of that quantity, 59.58 million new malware samples had been designed to focus on the Home windows working system, which quantities to 95.6%. Linux malware took up second place (1.76 million samples/2.8%), whereas the highest three rounded off with Android.

Hottest OS

Based on Atlas VPN, the cellular OS has seen 938,379 new threats between Q1 and Q2 2022, or 1.5% – and for macOS, researchers discovered 8,329 by no means earlier than seen variants. 

The important thing cause why cybercriminals are so centered on Home windows is its reputation, researchers declare. Microsoft’s working system is by far essentially the most dominant desktop product on the market, holding roughly 30% of the worldwide market share. Based on Statcounter’s international stats, Android holds 43.47% of the market share, iOS 17.25%, and Linux 1.08%.

Regardless of the horrid stats, the outlook isn’t as grim as it could appear. The researchers are saying that in comparison with the identical interval final 12 months, the variety of new malware strains has truly declined considerably – by greater than a 3rd (34%). 

Of all of the completely different variants, ransomware stays essentially the most damaging, and thus the most well-liked. Different well-liked variants embrace infostealers (able to stealing saved passwords, bank card data, key strokes and screenshots), cryptocurrency miners (also called cryptojackers) and bots (utilizing the compromised endpoints to launch distributed denial of service assaults, which might be bought as a service).

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