Every day, 60,000 new pieces of malware are counted, a number that quadruples the values found in 2007, according to a report today presented by McAfee.
The security company reveals that this year alone, by the end of the third quarter, it has already identified 14 million new parts of malware, a million more than last year at the same time.
In the quarter analyzed by the manufacturer, the malware that gained most prominence was the botnet Zeus.
Developed by Ukrainian cybercriminals and aimed at small American businesses, the network was responsible for losses in the order of $ 70 million.
Still during the quarter, McAfee identified an important evolution at Zeus.
The network has also evolved to attack mobile devices and intercept SMS messages that validate transactions, multiplying the chances of success in fraud attempts applied to banking transactions.
By email, efforts to disseminate Zeus also intensified during the quarter.
The authors of the scheme use well-known names like FedEx, Wester Union and others, to send messages that email with malware and try to increase the number of infected machines and at their service.
However, Zeus was not the most active botnet in the quarter.
Cutwail was responsible for about half of the activity registered in this field, worldwide.
Due to the action of this threat is a series of denial of service attacks directed at more than 300 sites, including Twitter or PayPal.
McAfee also points out that during the third quarter, 60 percent of the most searched topics on Google hide malware in the first 100 results presented, to exemplify the scale of the problem.
But if the malware does not stop increasing, the spam continues to fall.
According to data from the security company, the spam values - unsolicited e-mail messages – found for the third quarter were the lowest in the last two years.
Editorial note: A typo has been fixed.
