Now that we’ve reached the middle of the year, it’s time to take a look at the McAfee malware collection. During the first half of the year, 10 million samples entered in their database. That’s certainly no decrease compared with last year.
With approximately 54,800 new samples arriving per day, the total size of their collection is almost 12 terabytes. At end of 2007, in contrast, and with only 5.8 million samples, the total size was only 1.1TB.
First, let’s look at the main malware families–at left, McAfees 2008 graph; at right, the current one. (Click to enlarge these and subsequent charts.)
From these we can see that malware developers have lost their creative spirit. Malware designers create their apps to make money, not for style. Because the old techniques still work, it is not necessary to be inventive, just repetitive. For example, it is not rare to see more than 10,000 Koobface variants in a single month.
The next 2008 graph concerned McAfees figures compared to those of AV-test.org. At that time, I McAfee only a short span, of four months, shown at left.
Two years later, we can observe another increase. Since June 2009, McAfees collection has outgrown the AV-test database by two million. At that date, McAfee started getting more samples from more sources.
Today when we quantify the malware world, the consensus is to use the number of unique files in McAfess collections distinguished by their MD5 hash (or checksum). On June 30, McAfee counted 43,337,677 unique binary files.
Perhaps we’ll reach 54 million by the end of December.