AV-TEST is an independent testing organization, they will evaluate and rate the antivirus and security software of the operating system according to various standards, and provide the test results to users free of charge to help users choose the most suitable product for them. Recently, AV-ATLAS, a threat intelligence platform jointly owned by AV-TEST, released a report that allows users to understand the overall status of malware and Internet security in 2022.

First of all, according to their tweets, we can understand the current number of malware in these major operating systems:

New malware in 2022: In total, we caught 69,504,686 new samples of Windows, 12,445 new samples of macOS, 1,917,133 new samples of Linux, and 1,073,866 new samples of Android. Our malware database has grown by a total of 98084563 samples this year.

According to data provided by AV-TEST, in 2022, they found nearly 70 million new malware samples on the Windows platform; there were only about 12 thousand malware samples on macOS, compared to only The difference between the number of malware on the two platforms is more than 5,600 times that of Windows, and the number of malware on Linux is close to 2 million, ranking second among the three major desktop systems. Although it is higher than Mac, it is comparable to Windows. There is still a gap of 36 times than that.

On the mobile side, since AV-TEST only provides data on the Android platform, it is impossible to make a horizontal comparison with iOS.

If we look at malware growth for each operating system individually over the past year, you can see that while the total malware count for Windows is high, the platform has seen a steady growth rate since September drop (1 above).

Although the absolute number of newly discovered malware for Windows in 2022 is not low, considering that Windows is already easy to be targeted, and considering the number of malware in Windows over the years, the overall growth in 2022 is relatively stable. The main type of Windows malware is executable files, which account for more than 90 percent of all malware (Figure 2 above).

On the top-performing macOS platform, while the overall malware count was relatively low, the growth rates jumped in February and December. However, macOS has a very different place, that is, the proportion of PUA (Potentially unwanted application) of macOS is particularly high (the blue part in the above figure), while the proportion of the blue part in Windows and Linux is the same as the overall proportion is almost negligible.

Linux ranks second in terms of malware, but its growth rate has remained low since June.

The complete data of this report can be viewed on the AV-ATLAS official website.