In its cyber security incident report outlining vulnerabilities for the second quarter of 2017, security firm McAfee lists the health care sector as having suffered the most security incidents, which surpasses the public sector for the first time in six quarters. It confirmed that cyber-attacks against the health care sector continue to increase.

Although that statistic is disturbing, but not surprising, alarming statistics from the report include that there was a 67% increase in new malware samples in the second quarter of 2017 which equates to a whopping 52 million different kinds of malware in that quarter alone. The total number of malware samples were up 23% to close to 723 million different types of malware. That number is staggering and hard to grasp.

New ransomware increased 54% in the second quarter of 2017, and the total number of ransomware samples grew 47% in the past year totaling 10.7 million samples.

These statistics reinforce how companies are getting inundated with malware and ransomware on a daily basis and that it continues to be a major problem in protecting company data. It is hard to fathom trying to defend against 52 million new types of malware and 10.7 million new types of ransomware in a three month period of time, but that is the reality that exists for IT professionals.

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