How Many Viruses In Circulation Today

How many distinct strains of malware are in circulation today? If you said hundreds of thousands or millions, you’re way off. A close look at numbers from one leading security company helps explain why some big numbers don’t tell the whole story.

How many strains of malware are in circulation right now, for Windows PCs, Android devices, and Macs?

That seems like a straightforward question, but the answer is far from simple. And the number might be a lot lower than you think.

If you check with the leading security companies, you might be tempted to pick an answer in the millions. After all, that’s how many listings you’ll find in the definition files for common antivirus programs. At day’s end on April 12, for example, Symantec published the summary shown below, noting that its latest Virus Definitions file contained 17,702,868 separate signatures.