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 - a machine learning analysis system based on machine learning found within 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 that is automatically discovered and added to Kaspersky Lab's cloud database by Astraea has been steadily increasing over the past five years: from 7,53% in 2012 to 40,5% in December 2016. The percentage increases with the number of the new villains files discovered daily by Kaspersky Lab's experts and detection systems. This size has increased from 70.000 files per day in 2011 to 323.000 per day in 2016.
“One billion unique malware files is a remarkable milestone. It shows the scale of the digital criminal underground, which has evolved from the various small forums that offer personalized malicious tools, mass production of malware and custom digital crime services. It also highlights the quality and evolution of automated malware analysis technologies. Of all these billions of files, over 200 million have been added by our automatic machine 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 Team from Kaspersky Lab.
Astraea is one of the automatic machine learning systems 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 threat metadata (such as age, the origin, the file name, the 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.