About 2.5 million IoT devices were infected in Q4 of 2016, suggested a report by McAfee

According to a report by American global computer security Software Company McAfee, over two and a half million Internet of Things (IoT) devices were infected by Mirai botnet by the end of fourth quarter last year.

The malware ‘Mirai’ is capable to turn networked devices running on obsolete versions of Linux into remotely controlled “bots” which can be used for a large-scale network attacks. The ‘McAfee Labs Threats Report April 2017’ predicated that  over five IoT device IP addresses were infected by Mirai botnet each minute.

To shed more light, Vincent Weafer, Vice President McAfee Labs, in a statement said, “The security industry faces critical challenges in our efforts to share threat intelligence between entities, among vendor solutions, and even within vendor portfolios.”

However the general count of new malware samples grew 24 per cent in 2016 to 638 million samples regardless of showing a drop of 17 per cent in fourth quarter. Additionally,  McAfee also detected 176 new cyber-threats every minute, almost three every second in fourth quarter of 2016. Further, the total mobile malware grew 99 per cent in 2016.

“The number of total ransomware samples grew 88 per cent in 2016, despite 71 per cent drop in fourth quarter,” the company said.

Further, the findings showed that the number of new Mac OS malware samples that grew 245 per cent in fourth quarter due to adware collection. Although the number is small as compared to Windows threats. Also, overall Mac OS malware grew 744 per cent in 2016.