Virus writers have been busy this year, producing 20 million strains of malware in 2010 so far, a security firm has reported.
This equals the number of new kinds of malicious software created in the entirety of 2009, Panda Security said.
A root around Panda's Collective Intelligence database discovered the number of threats created and distributed so far this year accounted for a third of all viruses that exist.
Meanwhile, the average number of new threats created every day has spiked, rising from 55,000 to 63,000.
However, the growth rate of new threats has actually slowed since 2009.
From 2003, "new threats have increased at a rate of 100 per cent or more," explained Luis Corrons, Technical Director of PandaLabs.
"Yet so far in 2010 the rate of growth is around 50 per cent," he added.
Despite this slower rate of new threats, it does not mean the cyber crime market is shrinking, Corrons said.
"Quite the opposite; it continues to expand, and by the end of 2010 we will have logged more new threats in Collective Intelligence than in 2009," he added.
"Yet it seems as though hackers are applying economies of scale, reusing old malicious code or prioritising the distribution of existing threats over the creation new ones."
Earlier this month, a separate Panda report discovered 40 per cent of all rogueware ever created was produced in 2010.
