Europol recently ranked ransomware as "the most significant malware threat." But is this the reality? If we look at the facts realistically ransomware seems to be a marginal risk.
Despite the chaos caused by the recent ones attacks to WannaCry and NotPetya, these file encryption programs are part of a family of malware that globally accounted for less than one percent of the 600 million unique malware programs released for the 2016 Windows platform.
The AV-Test supports (PDF) that 2016 was incorrectly named "the year of ransomware" and that it won the title due to the damage it caused and the way malware targets organizations or can spread indiscriminately worldwide.
However, it notes that the fourth most common family of malware programs, 2016, was the Virlock file encryption ransomware. As reported by Microsoft in one her recent report, around half a billion emails with ransomware are shipped to Windows systems every quarter.
The share of banking Trojans it accounts for 2,74% of all malware, but the damage it caused is very difficult to record due to its nature: for example, bank network attacks SWIFT.
Overall, there was a 15% reduction in new malware software developed for Windows in 2016 compared to 2015, which suggests a certain slowdown in new threats. Windows malware accounts for 70% of all malware out of the 640 million samples collected by AV-Test. Malware for Android amounts to 5,6%.
Threats to Linux systems, such as the Mirai malware, increased by 300% in 2016, while macOS malware increased by 370%, from 819 different malware threats to 3.033. Most of these macOS threats are considered "potentially unwanted software"
The number of new malicious apps for Android in 2016 reached four million, or doubled from 2015. Most of these threats are applications trojan.
Ransomware for Android remained a minor threat to 0,22% of all 8.822 malware for Android, compared to 12.521 that existed last year.
