McAfee - Mid-year report notes 10 million malware samples captured

Several excellent charts are published which show a continued growth in malware.  Most of these are unique minor variants of a main family of malware.  The growth of malware variants is very challenging for security vendors to keep up with.

McAfee - Mid-year report shows huge growth in malware
http://www.avertlabs.com/research/blog/index.php/2010/07/07/malware-at-midyear-a-summary/

QUOTE: Now that we’ve reached the middle of the year, it’s time to take a look at our malware collection. During the first half of the year, 10 million samples entered in our database. That’s certainly no decrease compared with last year.

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.

Today when we quantify the malware world, the consensus is to use the number of unique files in our collections distinguished by their MD5 hash (or checksum). On June 30, we counted 43,337,677 unique binary files. Perhaps we’ll reach 54 million by the end of December.