When you look at the statistics of malware attacks across industries, a clear pattern emerges: attackers follow opportunity, and opportunity exists wherever security coverage has gaps.

Malware statistics point to a threat landscape that’s growing faster than most businesses realize. The way malware enters organizations is through a variety of vectors. Email, whether through phishing links or malicious attachments, remains the top initial infection vector. The Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report found that the human element played a role in 60% of all breaches. Attackers are preying on everyday activities that your employees perform without thinking: Click. Open. Reply as urgent.

According to the IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2026, vulnerability exploitation became the leading cause of attacks in 2025, accounting for 40% of incidents—a 44% increase from the prior year—while compromised credentials accounted for 32%.

Threat actors may also use malware to launch further parts of their attacks. Some malware variants are used as loaders for further types of malware, like ransomware. Other malware types have specific functionalities built in, enabling threat actors to move laterally, exfiltrate credentials, or maintain persistent access to a device for weeks or months, for example.

One common theme you’ll notice in many malware statistics is that detection is taking longer. Today’s attackers often leverage legitimate tools already present in their targets’ environments to help avoid detection. These are called Living Off the Land (LOTL) attacks. Since these are programs that wouldn’t normally be flagged as malicious by security teams, attackers can spend longer exploring environments undetected.

When attackers use compromised credentials, breaches take an average of 246 days to identify and contain. That’s nearly eight months of potential access before anyone spots the intrusion. AV-TEST registers over 450,000 new malware and potentially unwanted programs every day, with total known samples surpassing 1.56 billion as of early 2025. While many of these new samples were derived from existing malware families, others were only minimally changed in hopes of slipping past detection.

Is malware growing more common? Absolutely.

Organized crime accounts for more than 60% of threat actors behind corporate data breaches, and the majority of malware attacks are now run by malware-as-a-service operations with remote access trojan-style (RAT) customer support and the ability to pull off attacks in any industry.

In 2023, ransomware alone was involved in 23% of all confirmed breaches, and vulnerability exploitation as an initial access vector nearly tripled year-over-year. Ransomware, one of the most damaging forms of malware, appeared in 44% of all confirmed breaches in 2024, a huge jump from 32% the prior year.

The three most common malware threats businesses face are ransomware, infostealers, and RATs.

• Ransomware: Ransomware encrypts files and threatens to publish or sell sensitive data unless a ransom is paid, and it continues to be the costliest form of malware.

• Infostealers: Infostealers harvest sensitive data, including login credentials, session cookies, and financial information. They’re frequently just the opening volley of a more sophisticated attack—credentials harvested and funneled straight into secondary attacks. The Verizon 2025 DBIR found that 54% of ransomware victims had their domains appear in infostealer credential dumps, making infostealers a key enabler of ransomware access.

• RATs: RATs give attackers persistent, covert access to a compromised device and the ability to control it remotely. They’re commonly used to maintain persistence while attackers explore the network, gain higher privileges, and lay groundwork for bigger attacks.

What ransomware, infostealers, and RATs have in common is that they all rely on the same thing: time. The longer they go undetected, the more damage they can do—and as the malware statistics throughout this article show, attackers are very good at buying themselves that time.

Looking only at Windows-based malware, samples indexed in the AV-ATLAS malware repository increased from 920 million in 2024 to 995 million in 2025—upward of 8% growth. Macs and Linux machines are fair game for malware as well. With more companies buying Macs for employee use, macOS malware has seen consistent growth as attackers focus on Macs via malicious applications and trojanized software. Linux malware usually targets servers and cloud-based infrastructure with web shells and cryptocurrency miners.

Malware statistics on mobile devices are just as bad. More than 33 million mobile malware attacks were blocked in 2024. Mobile malware statistics reveal a threat that many businesses underestimate, especially those that haven’t extended their security policies to cover personal devices used for work. Some examples of infection vectors are malicious mobile applications, phishing SMS messages (smishing), and counterfeit software updates. Mobile malware often consists of banking trojans, spyware, and adware.

Malware attack statistics make one thing clear: no business is too small to be a target, and no industry is off limits. The average cost to recover from a data breach reached $4.88 million in 2024. Ransomware was present in 44% of confirmed breaches. Infostealer activity continues to surge—credential theft is now the most common initial attack vector, and those breaches take nearly 10 months on average to detect and contain. Business email compromise (BEC) continues to be a growing problem as attackers leverage AI to create deepfake voice scams and spoofed websites.

Where do most cyberattacks start? Two places: phishing emails and stolen credentials. Huntress offers Managed Security Awareness Training designed to help employees recognize and report threats before they become incidents.

Your security program probably spends a significant amount of time and resources preventing malware infections. Firewalls, antivirus, and email filtering matter, but none of them are 100% effective. As soon as malware infects your network, most security teams simply don’t have enough resources to respond to every alert. Too many real alerts get lost in the noise. Attackers know this and rely on it.

Malware isn’t going away. If anything, it’s only becoming more sophisticated, more automated, and more difficult to detect as time goes on. But businesses can gain the upper hand with the Huntress Agentic Security Platform. Huntress helps you find threats early, contain them fast, and recover before damage spreads across endpoints, identities, and email. Get a demo of the platform and learn how you can strengthen your security posture against malware.