Malware variety grows by 13.7% in 2019 due to web skimmers

Kaspersky’s web antivirus solution has identified a 13.7% rise in unique malicious objects compared to last year, with a total of 24.6 million being found.

The growth has been attributed to a staggering 187% rise in web skimmer files, while other threats such as back doors and banking Trojans also grew.

However, the presence of malicious cryptocurrency miners has fallen by 50%, most likely due to the lack of interest in cryptocurrencies over the year.

Around 85% of web threats were detected as malicious URLs, which now find themselves on Kaspersky’s blacklist.

“The volume of online attacks has been growing for years, but in 2019 we saw a clear shift from certain types of attacks that are becoming ineffective to the ones focused on gaining clear profit from users,” said Vyacheslav Zakorzhevsky, head of anti-malware research at Kaspersky.

“This is partly due to users becoming more aware of the threats and how to avoid them, and organisations steadily becoming more…