176 cyber threats detected every minute - McAfee

Vendor claims malware attacks were up 88 per cent in 2016

McAfee detected 176 new cyber threats a minute in Q4 of 2016, according to the vendor's latest threat report.

The newly independent McAfee claimed its research shows that the rate of malware attacks across the whole of 2016 grew 88 per cent annually, despite a sharp decline of new malware in Q4 compared with Q3.

Q3 saw 1.3 million new malware threats recorded, compared to under 400,000 in Q4. However, year on year new malware growth was up 24 per cent compared with 2015.

Vincent Weafeer, vice president of McAfee Labs, said: "The security industry faces critical challenges in our efforts to share threat intelligence between entities, among vendor solutions, and even within vendor portfolios.

"Addressing these challenges will determine the effectiveness of cybersecurity teams to automate detection and orchestrate responses, and ultimately tip the cybersecurity balance in favour of defenders.

"Increasingly sophisticated attackers are evading discrete defence systems, and siloed systems let in threats that have been stopped elsewhere because they do not share information. Threat intelligence sharing enables us to learn from each other's experiences, gaining insight based on multiple attributes that build a more complete picture of the context of cyber events."

McAfee also noted a significant increase in mobile and IoT malware - almost doubling in 2016 to 15 million incidences.

The vendor predicted that almost 2.5m Internet of Things (IoT) devices were infected by the Mirai botnet by the end of 2016 - the malware which notoriously brought the internet to a halt last October by attacking IoT devices and taking the likes of Netflix and eBay offline.