H cloud malware database Kaspersky Lab now contains one billion malicious software objects, including viruses, Trojan, backdoors, ransomware promotional programs and applications and their individual parts. A fifth identified as malicious by the Astraea - one system analysis of machine learning-based malware found inside its infrastructure Kaspersky Lab.
The number of digital threats that occur daily is so great that it is impossible to process each of them manually. For this reason, automating the process of discovering and analyzing malware, combined with human expertise, is the best approach to combating modern digital threats.
The percentage of malware discovered and automatically added to Kaspersky Lab's cloud database by Astraea has been steadily increasing over the past five years: from 7,53% 2012 to 40,5% in December 2016. The percentage increases according to the number of new malicious files that are discovered daily by Kaspersky Lab's specialists and detection systems. This size has increased from 70.000 files per day to 2011 to 323.000 daily 2016.
"One billion unique malicious software files are a remarkable landmark. It shows the scale of underground action of digital criminals, which has evolved from various small forums that offer personalized malware tools, bulk malware and customized digital crime services. This highlights the quality as well as the development of automated malware analysis technologies. Of all these billions of files, more than 200 millions have been added by the Automatic Mechanical Learning System Astraea. Our advanced systems not only detect the vast majority of the known malware we receive on a daily basis, but they also discover unknown threats. Although the remaining 800 million files have been added by other internal detection systems, or by experts, the contribution of malware engineering and malware detection systems to cloud its database Kaspersky Lab is essential and will continue to grow, "he commented Vyacheslav Zakorzhevsky, head of Anti-Malware Kaspersky Lab team.
Astraea is one of the automated software for malware analysis and is part of Kaspersky Lab's protection infrastructure. Astraea automatically analyzes alerts from protected computers and helps discover previously unknown threats. By using metadata of threats (such as age, background, file name, file path, etc.), the system is able to fully detect threats without information about the contents of the file.
Kaspersky Lab's "number of the year" is part of it Kaspersky Security Bulletin for 2016. Other parts include Threat predictions of 2017, published on 16 November and is available here, With the theme of the year: Ransomware, And the Summary of the reportThe Review and Statistical data, will all be available from December.
More information about threat statistics is available on the dedicated site: Securelist.com.