244 new cyber threats reported every minute in the first quarter of 2017: Report

For each minute in the first quarter this year, researchers reported 244 new cyber threats — a sharp increase of 53 per cent over the final quarter of 2016, a new report said on Tuesday. According to cyber security company McAfee Labs, more than half of 301 publicly disclosed security incidents in the quarter came from the health, public and education sectors. There were 32 million malware samples recorded in the first quarter, and mobile malware doubled in growth in Asia, which contributed to a 57 per cent increase in global infection rates.
The largest contributor to this growth was Android/SMSreg, a potentially unwanted programme detection from India. “The report reminds us that deception has evolved from simple threats on a set of simple systems, to complex threats across a wide variety of systems, to entirely new paradigms such as machine learning,” said Vincent Weafer, Vice President McAfee Labs, in a statement.
Due to “Congur” ransomware attacks on Android OS devices, the number of new ransomware samples rebounded in the first quarter. The number of total ransomware samples grew 59 per cent in the past four quarters to 9.6 million known samples. The report also noted that the total number of Mac OS malware samples grew 53 per cent in the first quarter.