http://www.emsisoft.com:80/en/kb/articles/news080116/Data and facts - Every PC infected 8 times
The signature inventory of pests recognized by a-squared Free and a-squared Anti-Malware had somewhat more than 500,000 entries at the beginning of last year. At the beginning of 2008 this has already reached a record of 1.1 million Malware signatures. Very few Anti-Spyware and Anti-Trojan products can keep up with us at this level. The number of reported infected PCs also rose accordingly, from 180,000 in 2006 to over 250,000 in 2007. Whereas 1.4 million Malware infections were reported by a-squared users in 2006, this rose to an unbelievable figure of 1.9 million last year. The shocking fact is: on average, every PC was infected with 8 different types of Malware!
Malware tendencies - Big money
Although most of the reported Malware came from the Spyware and Adware area, 2007 clearly showed a continuation of the trend towards
professional Trojans.
Malware is no longer being built for self promotion purposes, or for fun, but rather with the primary aim of earning large amounts of money. Most of the newly discovered Worms, Bots and Trojans no longer contain destructive routines. They are purely designed for the purpose of hijacking computers to allow them to be remote controlled. The computing power obtained in this way is generally known on the black market as so-called Botnets.
Spammers use this computing power to anonymously send millions of Spam emails.
Other shadowy organizations use the storage capacity to store and distribute illegal data such as child pornography or similar.
As the victim, you usually do not notice that your computer is being used as a trading place for this type of data.
The only clear indications are usually only an Internet connection that becomes continuously slower and less computer performance for your own applications.
