Malware is exploding across the globe, and now we know by how much.

Security company Comodo Group Inc. said in a new report that it detected a nearly fourfold increase in malware infections in the second quarter — not compared with a year ago, but with just three months ago. In its “Comodo Threat Research Labs Q2 2017 report” out today, the company detected 97 million malware infections in the quarter, up from 25 million detected in the first quarter.

Leading the pack with malware infections were trojans, which is software or code that pretends to be something else to trick users into installing it. There were 5.8 million trojan infections, followed by 4.5 million worm infections, 2.6 million traditional viruses followed by 209,000 “backdoor” installations, a method of bypassing conventional authentication.

Those behind malware creation had no qualms about spreading the love, with infections detected in 236 of the world’s 253 country-code top-level domains. Some countries were favored over others, with Russia, the Philippines and Indonesia topping the list for infection. The United States was not far behind, leading the list for trojan infections.

Interestingly, the type of malware tends to vary depending on the wealth of a given nation. “Backdoors are the highest ‘class’ of malware, targeting the most affluent countries, often in a targeted fashion; Australia, Great Britain, and Japan appeared prominently in this data…. Trojans also tend to be more clustered around richer nations, but appear in every country, and every vertical,” Comodo said in a blog post. “Viruses and worms are more often found in poorer countries; viruses are widespread, while worms in particular take advantage of the world’s least protected networks.”

In an age of high-profile hacking attacks, the report also found that relatively few types of malware dominate infections. Upatre, a trojan first detected in 2013, accounted for 83 percent of all infections in the U.S. during the quarter despite its relatively old age. In other categories, Brontok topped the worm chart, a new version of Ramnit which first emerged in 2011 topped the virus chart, while DarkKomet was the most commonly used backdoor.

While noting that no one was safe from malware attacks, the report concluded that telecom, technology and online services companies are currently the most popular targets for attackers.

Photo: iphonedigital/Flickr