According to the quarterly McAfee Labs Threats Report, conducted by Intel Security, over 6 trillion spam messages were sent across the world in just the first three months of 2015, illustrating the sheer scale of the problem facing computer users across the world.
Overall, McAfee Labs reported seeing 362 attacks every minute – equivalent to six every second. The report also highlighted the growing threat of ransomware attacks, where hackers gain control of a users’ machine and demand money to release it.
In Q1 2015, McAfee Labs found a 165% increase in ransomware, driven largely by new ‘families’ of hacks such as the hard-to-detect CTB-Locker, Teslacrypt, and the emergence of new versions of CryptoWall, TorrentLocker, and BandarChor. Elsewhere, the report found that the first quarter of 2015 saw a slight decline in new PC malware, a trend it put down to the quietening down of the notorious SoftPulse adware family.
The report also found a major surge in the number of new mobile malware samples, which increased by 49% from Q4 2014 to Q1 2015, and a surge in the number of phishing domains detected in the UK.
Overall, 887 phishing domains were discovered in the UK, higher than France (799), the Netherlands (680), Canada (641), Russia (583) and Brazil (452).
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