Viruses per year

On 16 Aug, 15:06, Luca <elteeXF88s... DeleteThis @despammed.com> wrote:
> Hello,
> are there some statistics about the number of viruses (total and in the
> wild) per year?
>
> Thank you,
> Luca

There are lots, but they all relate to different things. Do you mean
the number of virus infections or the number of individual virus
variations?

Either way, it is impossible for anyone to know for sure exactly how
many variations of viruses exist, let alone how many systems are
infected. If you knew that, you could probably create the most
accurate anti-virus program in the world.

If you need some information for a report you could try Virus
Bulletin, which publishes a Prevalence Report with the most 'popular'
viruses and the number of reported instances of each. Of course, this
can not be 100 per cent accurate for the reason I mentioned above.

In June 2007 VB claims that the most prevalent virus was W32/Bagle,
which represented 27.63% of infections (a total of 2,754,822
infections). We can calculate that, if VB is right, there were very
nearly 10 million virus infections in June 2007. Only eleven families
of virus featured heavily. Each of the other types of virus counted
for less than 1%.

So you could say that there are eleven important viruses or 10 million
viruses. Probably both would be wrong, but it's the best I can come up
with
 >> Stay informed about: Viruses per year 

Hello, thank you for your answer.

Si wrote:
> There are lots, but they all relate to different things. Do you mean
> the number of virus infections or the number of individual virus
> variations?

I am interested in the number of unique virus (or unique
virus+variations if that's easier) that are and were known for each year.

For instance... it is said that the first microcomputer virus has been
Elk Cloner around 1981/82 (excluding pre-80ies mainframe viruses like
Creeper and Reaper, Rabbit, Pervading Animal and so forth). I would like
to know, year by year, how the virus population has grown since those days.

Now that you make me think about it it would also be interesting to know
the number of infections.

> Either way, it is impossible for anyone to know for sure exactly how
> many variations of viruses exist, let alone how many systems are
> infected. If you knew that, you could probably create the most
> accurate anti-virus program in the world.

Ok well, i am not interested into exact numbers... i would also be happy
to know just how many unique viruses were known by a specific
antivirus-maker (such as McAfee, etc) from 1980 up to today, year by year.
For now i only managed to find some virlist.txt of old McAfee products
that show a list of known viruses but it is hard to find one for each
year

> If you need some information for a report you could try Virus
> Bulletin, which publishes a Prevalence Report with the most 'popular'
> viruses and the number of reported instances of each. Of course, this
> can not be 100 per cent accurate for the reason I mentioned above.

Where can i find this "virus bulletin"?

Thank you,
Luca
 >> Stay informed about: Viruses per year 

On 16 Aug, 19:15, Luca <elteeXF88s....DeleteThis@despammed.com> wrote:
> Ok well, i am not interested into exact numbers... i would also be happy
> to know just how many unique viruses were known by a specific
> antivirus-maker (such as McAfee, etc) from 1980 up to today, year by year.

In 1999 McAfee told me that its virus sample collection had grown
exponentially over the previous five years. I guess that gives an idea
of numbers, but I don't have any hard facts on this - particularly not
for recent years. Each security company will have different figures
anyway.
Best of luck.
 >> Stay informed about: Viruses per year 

On 16 Aug, 19:23, "Vanguard" <vangu... DeleteThis @mail.invalid> wrote:
> Don't know of such summary stats that track over the years. Old
> viruses are ineffective since they are caught by existing signatures.

That is largely true, but not always. Some signature lists are trimmed
to remove old viruses (this makes the definition updates smaller and
faster to download, as well as sometimes reducing the strain on system
resources on your personal computer).

Also, small variations to a virus will allow it to bypass many anti-
virus program's protection. Today your AV product might detect
SomeVirus.a but next week a slightly different version may appear
(SomeVirus.b). This is essentially the same old virus but is able to
infect protected systems until a new update is created. And so on...
That is why only eleven viruses make up the majority of June 2007's
most prevalent (listed in one of the earlier posts). Each of those
eleven will actually consist of a number of variations.

There are still copies of Netsky infecting PCs today, and this virus
first appeared in 2004.
 >> Stay informed about: Viruses per year