There were over 28 million malware attacks in 2020 and 102 million detections of potentially unwanted programs that Kaspersky security solutions accounted for by the beginning of August.
These numbers not only show the malware that attacks users but also the “grey zone” programs that grow in popularity and disturb their experiences, while users might not even know they are there.
Potentially unwanted applications (PUAs) are programs that are usually not considered to be malicious by themselves but influence the user experience in a negative way.
For instance, adware fills user devices with ads.
While calculating interim results of threat landscape activity in African countries, the researchers noticed that PUAs attack users almost four times more often than traditional malware.
“The reason why ‘grey zone’ software is growing in popularity is that it is harder to notice at first and that if the program is detected, its creators won’t be considered to be cybercriminals. The problem with them is that users are not always aware they consented to the installation of such programs on their device and that in some cases, such programs are exploited or used as a disguise for malware downloads. This is why many security solutions, including ours, flags such programs to make sure users are aware of its presence, influence on their device and activity,” says Denis Parinov, a security researcher at Kaspersky.
Evaluating results over the same 7-month period in Nigeria, there were 3.8 million malware attacks and 16.8 million PUA detections.
In South Africa, there were almost 10 million malware attacks and a staggering 43 million PUA detections.
Kenyan users had it worse with around 14 million, and 41 million PUA appearances.
