PandaLabs says hackers are breaking records

According to the latest internet security report from PandaLabs hackers are breaking all established records when it comes to the nefarious business of creating new threats.

The security firm said that it had recorded five million new strains of malware in just the last three months. Alarmingly most were banking trojans, the rest a mix of adware, worms, hacking tools and spyware. Trojans took a 38 per cent share of all infections, adware was responsible for 18.68 per cent, and worms 14 per cent. Country to country, Taiwan was found to have the most active infections, 29 per cent, but is closely followed by the US and the UK, which both have roughly 25 per cent.

The risk of infection continues to worsen, according to PandaLabs, which paints a bleak picture of the future. "We are currently receiving some 50,000 new examples of malware everyday, this compares to 37,000 just a few months ago. There is no reason to believe that the situation will improve in the coming months," explained Luis Corrons, technical director at PandaLabs.

PandaLabs said that crooks would throw almost every resource at their disposal in order to infect the maximum number of machines. It said that these varied from social networking attacks to search engine manipulation. The firm also fingered a few firms for exposing their users to potential risks. It called one of the vulnerabilities patched by Microsoft, 'Striking', and another, 'Alarming'.

What with all these risks out there PandaLabs suggests that users install some web security software. You shouldn't need to look too far to find a supplier of that.