Bangalore: Malwares and cyber threats have been increasing over the past few years, According to new data released by Microsoft this week, the number of malware variants went from 1,000 in 1991 to millions in 2011.

Microsoft published a special edition of its Security Intelligence Report (SIR) to celebrate its 10th anniversary of the launch of its Trustworthy Computing initiative. "What we wanted to do from the Security Intelligence Report was look at the past 10 years and how the threat landscape" has evolved, says Tim Rains, director of Microsoft's TwC. "A lot of these samples were new variants of a same family"  reports Kelly Jackson in darkreading.com

The report looks at the "cleanest" countries malware infection-wise. Finland had the lowest rate of infected machines in 2011, with just over one infected machine per 1,000 machines. Japan had just over two per 1,000 machines; followed by Norway, Switzerland, and Australia, all of which had fewer than four. On average, Microsoft cleans up 10 machines per 1,000 globally.

Turkey (57), Korea (20), Brazil (just under 20), Taiwan (more than 15), and Spain (just over 10) didn't fare as well. "We wondered why Finland and others were so low," Raines says, so Microsoft did a case study on one of Finland's largest ISPs, TeliaSonera.

Rains says that TeliaSonera wanted security to be a competitive differentiator in its services. TeliaSonera found that it was taking an average of 40 minutes per customer to clean up the machines. So the ISP automated the process, and used the Rustock data from Microsoft's DCU to identify infected machines on its network and kept them quarantined until they were cleaned up.

To stay protected against  threats and attacks Rain says "The key takeaways for other users is improve your basic hygiene, run newer software, and [install] updates. Keep yourself educated out there, and if you're an organization or business or country, alter your security posture to be more holistic”