From PC Mag: Ready to get scared? Today is the day that Malwarebytes, the now-venerable provider of anti-malware programs for all major operating systems at home or work, releases its 2020 State of Malware Report. It takes into account all the threats and attacks the company tracked in the year 2019 (specifically those made in real time and detected by its software and other sources).
The good news first: Detections of consumer threats were down 2 percent from 2018 (41.7 million to 40.9 million, which is still an egregious number). The bad news: Businesses got attacked 13 percent more (leaping from 8.5 million to 9.6 million). Combining both showed a 1 percent increase.
The chart above shows the major threats for consumers, with adware dominant. Trojan horse malware is on the decline, but only for consumers—Malwarebytes is clear that trojans will continue to be a problem in 2020. The trend is that "cybercriminals are losing interest in consumer targets." The exception: The detection of hacktools used to hack into computers or networks is up 42 percent on the consumer side. Hacktools are not intrinsically bad, but they let bad actors get away with a lot of nastiness. The report calls the increase "concerning."
The business side of things is all over the place. Adware spiked in the early part of 2019, then dropped. But it was the number-one threat category for the year, up 463 percent from 2018. Hacktools detected in business also were way up—224 percent. Ransomware, always a high-profile threat, was technically down 6 percent.
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