AV-TEST shares a large number of statistics related to the malware it discovered during 2022, updating its data in this regard and allowing comparisons with previous years. Since summarizing everything the company has released would make for a very long post, we’ll focus on malware and potentially unwanted applications (PUAs) targeting Windows, Linux, macOS, and Android.

To begin with, to date AV-TEST has found 70,166,547 new malware and 2,009,789 new PUAs against Windows during 2022. While the amounts may be scary, they are actually lower than in previous years. As a result, the company released a total of more than 750 million malware and more than 187 million PUAs against Microsoft’s operating system, which remains the most affected by malware today despite the strong growth of some competitors.

Talk about Linux, AV-TEST found 1,923,897 malware and 1,740 potentially unwanted applications in 2022. The amount of open source operating system malware has grown exponentially in recent years, but in many cases, perhaps the vast majority, the target is not so much the desktop industry as the Internet of Things (IoT) and vulnerable servers. In fact, one of the most popular families is the destructive Mirai trojan, which compromised much of the Internet years ago with denial-of-service (DdoS) attacks.

According to the company, there are currently in a total of 4,249,202 million malware and 19,962 PUAs against Linux and is the only system to see an increase in amount compared to 2021.

from his side, Mac Operating System turned out pretty well after discovering AV-TEST himself 12,515 new malware and 13,682 PUAs in 2022, for a total of 910,311 and 894,861 respectively. Of the four systems from which AV-TEST aggregated malware and PUAs, macOS is by far the best quantitatively, perhaps in part because it is clearly less used than the other three when considering home, servers, and IoT environments. .

And finally we have Androida system that has earned fame as a repeat victim of malware, although in 2022 the number of new malware and PUAs discovered by AV-TEST is clearly lower than in previous years, with 1,081,894 and 739,209 respectively. In total, the company registered 33,178,953 malware and 22,767,908 potentially unwanted applications. against Google’s mobile operating system, which is consolidated as the second most affected after Windows due to lack of records on iOS.

Finally, we can mention a graph in which AV-TEST has distributed all the malware it registered according to the operating system it targets. Here you can see that Windows eats almost the whole pie, which is due to aspects such as the clearly dominant position held over the decades, the fact that most users use the system with an administrator-type account, and which for a long time was almost the only target of malware that actually started diversifying at the platform level relatively recently.

As we’ve said, we’ve focused on home-focused operating systems in this post, but AV-TEST has released data related to IoT, spam, and black hat SEO.