Viruses, Malware Top the One Million Mark

Symantec's latest bi-annual Internet Security Threat Report, released on 4/8, shows that (at least according to Symantec), the number of viruses, trojans and malware in circulation has topped one million.

Volume XIII of the report (.PDF) says (p. 50):

In the last six months of 2007, Symantec detected 499,811 new malicious code threats (figure 14). This is a 136 percent increase over the previous period, when 212,101 new threats were detected, and a 571 percent increase over the last half of 2006. In total, there were 711,912 new threats detected in 2007, compared to 125,243 threats in 2006, an increase of 468 percent. This brings the overall number of malicious code threats identified by Symantec to 1,122,311, as of the end of 2007. This means that almost two thirds of all malicious code threats currently detected were created during 2007.

Naturally, the vast majority of these are Windows-based threats, and many are variants of already circulating viruses.

The U.S. tops the list of countries in terms of "malicious activity" by a wide margin with China second (table above).

Besides saying you need an antivirus (AV) program, what else does this say? The obvious, tried-and-true warnings:

• Use an AV program and keep it updated.
  

• Watch out for phishing threats (BTW, the Carnegie-Mellon game is great way to learn about phishing)
  

• Don't open attachments from anyone you're not expecting a file from. It may look like it's coming from a friend, but they may be infected or the address may be spoofed.
  

Additionally, I always recommend people use AV software that has good heuristics - meaning it will detect malware not in its database. After all, with over 1 million threats, soon AV databases will need a hard drive all to themselves.