by AKANI CHAUKE
JOHANNESBURG, (CAJ News) – KASPERSKY reports that its detection systems discovered an average of 500 000 malicious files per day in 2025, marking a 7-percent increase compared to the previous year.
Certain types of threats saw growth globally, with a 59-percent surge in password stealer detections, a 51-percent growth in spyware detections, and a 6-percent growth in backdoor detections.
Windows remains the primary target for cyberattacks. Some 48 percent of users on Windows were targeted by different types of threats throughout 2025. For Mac users, this figure stands at 29 percent.
Globally, 27 percent of users were attacked with a web threat.
Web threats are not limited to online activity but ultimately involve the internet at some stage for inflicted harm. In Latin America, 26 percent of users were attacked by web threats in 2025, while this share reached 25 percent in Africa, 21 percent in Europe and 19 percent in the Middle East.
These include malware that is spread via removable USB drives, CDs and DVDs,
“The current cyberthreat landscape is defined by increasingly sophisticated attacks on organisations and individuals around the world,” said Alexander Liskin, Head of Threat Research at Kaspersky.
The official said this increasingly complex threat landscape makes implementing robust cybersecurity strategies vital for organisations, as failure to do so could lead to months of downtime in the event of attacks.
“Individual users should also always use reliable security solutions, otherwise they put not only their data and money at risk, but also those of the organisations where they work,” Liskin added.
Kaspersky is a global cybersecurity and digital privacy company founded in 1997.
– CAJ News