"As new threat groups emerge and are established, legacy threat groups survive takedown attempts and they focus on developing new malware. This signals that these groups are allocating their resources to prioritise the impact of their attacks rather than sheer volume," said Ismael Valenzuela, vice-president of threat research and intelligence at BlackBerry.
"Additionally, minor altering of a piece of malware might not seem very sophisticated but contributes to an overwhelming increase in the success and severity of attacks," added Valenzuela.
The data, contained in the latest edition of BlackBerry's regular Global threat intelligence report provides a clear indication that underground malware developers are quicker to update and adapt their code, making it more potent, resilient and harder to analyse.
Critical infrastructure operators were the primary targets, with more than 800,000 attacks, roughly 400,000 of them focusing on the financial services sector.
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