AV-TEST estimates 12 million new malware variants per month

The Independent institute AV-Test issued an analysis that recorded 143 Million new malware samples in 2014 and 12 million new variants per month.

The German independent IT security institute AV-Test has published an interesting statistic on the current diffusion of malicious code, the data reveal that experts noticed 12 million new variants per month.

AV-Test provides professional evaluations of security software, its analysis focuses on the detection capability of principal security applications, the data are published on daily bases.

The organization focuses on malware designed to infect Windows and Android systems that are most targeted OS due to their diffusion. The data have been compiled by the independent institute AV-Test that extracted them from its analysis tools Sunshine and VTEST. Every single threat detected by the analysis systems is classified and information collected by AV-Test.

12 million fresh strains of malware detected every month are just one aspect of the interesting analysis, AV-Test also revealed that every second four samples are available in the wild.

Analyzing data related to the last 12 months, the month with the greatest number of new threats was August, when over 18 million new samples were identified by AV-Test.

As for the total number of threats caught last year, more than 325 million pieces were analyzed during the month of December alone.

The statistics reported a total amount of new malware in 2014 of 143 million, an amazing quantity if we consider the portion of malicious code that is detected by principal Antivirus software.

“The AV-TEST Institute registers over 390,000 new malicious programs every day. These are examined using the analysis tools Sunshine and VTEST, classified according to their characteristics and saved. Visualisation programs then transform the results into diagrams that can be updated and produce current malware statistics.” reads the official page published by AV-Test.

The data shows a constant increase in new cyber threats recorded over the years, the AV-Test twitted an interesting graph that resume the situation since 2010. The graph below shows that the number of new malware in 2014 is significantly greater respect the number of new strains of malware observed in the previous years.

Compared to 2013, AV-Test statistics show that the difference in new threats is of about 60 million, meanwhile in 2010 the institute recorded only 17.5 million malware.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs –  AV-TEST,malware)