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McAfee Reports That Malware Is On The Rise

It seems like there’s a report of some new kind of malware hitting PCs and Mac every day now. Hackers are getting smarter and security companies are playing catch up. Even then, the regular comp...
McAfee Reports That Malware Is On The Rise
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  • It seems like there’s a report of some new kind of malware hitting PCs and Mac every day now. Hackers are getting smarter and security companies are playing catch up. Even then, the regular computer user doesn’t seem to care. The latest statistics from McAfee may just start making you care.

    McAfee recently published its quarterly Threats Report and things do not look good. Let’s just get the worst new out of the way: malware is on the rise. McAfee now has over 90 million samples of Malware in its database. It was at a little under 60 million in July of last year. New types of malware have also been greatly increasing with Q2 of this year seeing over 8 million new types of malware alone.

    While it contributes little to the overall malware numbers, Mac malware is also on the rise again. It hit a high point in the second quarter of 2011 when over 600 types of new malware hit Mac OS X. That number immediately dropped to a little over 150 in next quarter, but it’s now up to a little over 400 in Q2 of this year.

    Traditional desktop computing is no longer the only platform that’s susceptible to malware. We’ve already covered the massive amounts of malware that hits the Android platform, but McAfee’s statistics put things into a much better perspective. They found that mobile malware has hit an all time high this year with over 13,000 mobile samples in their database. It was a little under 2,000 this time last year. The first quarter of 2012 alone saw over 6,000 new types of mobile malware being released in the wild.

    It’s easy to see that malware is on the rise across the board, but where is it all coming from? It may surprise that most malware attacks originate in the United States. It probably shouldn’t surprise you, however, that most victims are also in the United States. Other nations leading the world in attacks including Venezuela, Japan and China.

    The details in McAfee’s latest reports seemingly confirm that crime is moving to the Internet. There’s just no real reward in traditional crime anymore and the stakes are too high. Many criminals are finding that its easier to steal information, money and other things via malware. Instead of pretending that the Internet doesn’t exist, worried netizens should just stay on their guard. Malware can’t affect you unless you let it.

    [h/t: CNN Money]

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