Malwarebytes' top-rated mobile threat in 2019 was a team of pre-installed potentially unwanted program (PUP) variants that combined for 321,103 detections. Pre-installed malware on mobile devices is an issue too. Seven of the 10 top consumer threat families were adware variants, as well as five of the top 10 business threat families. Adware increased 13 percent, year-on-year, for consumers and 463 percent for businesses.
Overall business threats rose 13 percent to about 9.6 million detections.Īdware has been particularly problematic for consumers and businesses on Windows, Mac and Android devices too, deploying aggressive techniques for serving up advertisements, hijacking browsers, redirecting web traffic and proving extremely difficult to uninstall.
In addition, a wave of new hack tools and registry key disablers debuted in Malwarebytes' top detections, reflecting greater sophistication used by today's business-focused attackers.
Among other findings of the report, Trojan-turned-botnets Emotet and TrickBot made a return in 2019 to target organizations alongside new ransomware families, such as Ryuk, Sodinokibi and Phobos.
