A Look at One Day of Malware Samples

In September we added 1.6 million malware to our database. With these new entries, our malware collection surpassed 70 million samples.

The five million new samples in the third quarter represent approximately 55,000 samples per day, 2,300 per hour, or 38 per minute.

To get a sense of these threats, I examined one day at random and attempted to classify all these files. The results that follow are not fully accurate, but are an overview of what malware arrived in our collection that day.

Among the 33,000 Trojans, I was able to isolate:

  • 4,500 Keyloggers and Password Stealers
  • 3,200 Backdoors
  • 2,000 Downloaders
  • 1,500 Droppers
  • 1,000 Exploits
  • 1,000 AutoRuns
  • 1,000 Fake alerts
  • 1,000 Rootkits

 
If the trend continues, in two years our malware collection will surpass 100 million samples.