McAfee: Malware samples exceeded expectations in 2011
The number of malware samples discovered worldwide unfortunately surpassed expectations for 2011 overall, according to McAfee’s fourth quarter Threats Report.
Last year, McAfee researchers predicted that global malware occurrences would reach at least 75 million. By August 2011, the number already stood at 65 million and counting.
In the Q4 report, McAfee refrained from providing an exact figure, except to say that “the cumulative number of unique malware samples in the collection still exceeds the 75 million mark.” Two areas that saw a huge climb in activity were malicious sites and mobile malware. McAfee found up to 9,300 new bad sites added each day in Q4 — up from an average of 6,500 in Q3 2011. Thus, approximately one in every 400 URLs were malicious, with a total of more than 700,000 malicious sites for the year overall.
