Nearly A Third of All Computers Scanned Around The World In 2012 Were Infected, Reports PandaLabs

ORLANDO, Fla., Feb. 6, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- PandaLabs, the anti-malware laboratory of Panda Security, has released its 2012 Annual Security Report, which details an extremely interesting year of data theft, social networking attacks and cyber-warfare. According to the report, 31.98 percent of all computers scanned around the world had malware. With the addition of 2012's numbers, the grand total of all malware samples in PandaLabs' database has reached approximately 125 million and PandaLabs researchers estimated that at least 27 million new strains of malware were created in 2012 alone. Trojans continued to account for most of the new threats, comprising three out of every four new malware strains created in 2012. The full report is available at http://press.pandasecurity.com/press-room/reports/.

These figures show cyber-criminals' sheer capacity to automate the creation of new malware variants, further evidenced by the average number of new threats created and released every day, totaling approximately 74,000. This malware avalanche can be stopped with Panda Security's Collective Intelligence technologies, a cloud-based proprietary system that automatically detects, analyzes and classifies 99.4 percent of all malware received by PandaLabs.

Malware

In 2012, Trojans dominated the threat landscape more than ever before. Three out of every four malware infections were caused by Trojans (76.56 percent), up ten points compared to 2011. One of the reasons for this growth was the increased use of exploit kits such as Black Hole, which are capable of exploiting multiple system vulnerabilities to infect computers automatically without user intervention. Viruses came second (8 percent), whereas worms dropped to third place accounting for 6.44 percent of all infections. Here is a visual depicting these trends:

http://press.pandasecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/PLENG1.jpg.

The countries leading the list of most infections are China, South Korea and Taiwan, with 54.89, 54.15 and 42.14 percent of infected computers respectively.

On a positive note, the proportion of infected computers around the world decreased significantly. In China, the number of infected computers dropped from