A Third of All Malware Appeared This Year Alone

According to a report from Panda Security, as much as 34% of all malware ever created was unleashed upon users during the first ten months of this year.

The company's Collective Intelligence threats database, which contains all samples collected by the company, currently has around 134 million separate files.

The security vendor says that 60 million of those are malware and that 20 million new strains, new threats and variants of already existent ones, were created this year.

The report adds that the daily malware output rate has increased by 14.5% compared to last year, from 55,000 files in 2009 to 63,000 in 2010.

This is in line with a recent report from McAfee, which estimates malware growth to be at around 60,000 new samples per day, an all time high.

In addition, the lifespan of over half of new samples is just 24 hours, suggesting that this year cybercriminals focused more on defeating AV detection than actually creating new threats.

This is also reflected in its estimated growing rate. Since 2003, the number of new threats has doubled year on year, but in 2010, the rate so far has been only 50%.

"This doesn’t mean that there are fewer threats or that the cyber-crime market is shrinking. Quite the opposite; it continues to expand, and by the end of 2010 we will have logged more new threats in Collective Intelligence than in 2009.

"Yet it seems as though hackers are applying economies of scale, reusing old malicious code or prioritizing the distribution of existing threats over the creation new ones," said Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs.

Panda Security has also recently reported that the number of fake antivirus applications, commonly referred to as scareware, has also increased this year by 40% and infected over 5% of all computers.

An even earlier study from the company showed that trojans accounted for over half of new malware samples and infections.