China may be odds-on to top the medal table at the London 2012 Olympic Games, with less than a week to go, but according to a new report South Korea has the Chinese well and truly beaten as far as malware infected PCs are concerned. And unlike at the Olympic Games where the USA and Great Britain are ahead of Korea in the medal tables currently, both America and Britain are nowhere to be seen in the top ten most malware infected countries, and the UK actually makes it into the 'least infected' listings.
The latest Panda Security antimalware labs quarterly report reveals that, for the first time ever, South Korea is top of the medal table when it comes to the numbers of malware infections per country. The report, covering the period between April and June 2012, shows that while the average number of infected PCs globally speaking is down by nearly 4% at 31.63%, the number in South Korea is a staggering 57.3% which is up by nearly 3% on the previous quarter. It is also head of China on 51.94%, with Taiwan and Bolivian some way behind these two in third and fourth places respectively. The least infected country is Switzerland with an average of 'just' (and I use that word with my teeth gritted as it is still way too high) 18.4% followed by Sweden on 19.07% - sadly no other countries could manage to drop below the 20% figure.
Looking at the report in depth, Pandalabs discloses that most of the new threats were rather unsurprisingly of the Trojan variety, accounting for some 78.92% of the total. Worms on 10.78% and viruses on 7.44% look like they are almost forgotten, by comparison, in second and third places on the list. Interestingly, the days of adware and spyware could soon be over, as only 2.69% of the new threats revealed in the analysis fell into the sub-category. Viruses had also fallen quite considerably from the report published this time last year, down from 14.24%, but worms are on the up - rising from 9.3% in the last quarter.
Trojans also, again without any hint of surprise at all, accounted for the largest number of infected PCs with 76.18% which is up from 66.03% last quarter. Viruses accounted for 7.82% of infections and worms 6.69% - the latter figure being interesting as the actual infection rate is well below the new threats detected rate which suggests that, as far as worms are concerned anyway, security software is doing a reasonable job in holding back the threat tide.
