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Such are the findings to emerge from research carried out by Kaspersky Lab, which reports that, in order to conduct all these attacks, cyber criminals used 10,604,273 unique hosts - 60.5% more than were used in 2012,.

The USA and Russia are the leading hosts of malicious web resources - 45% of web attacks neutralised by Kaspersky Lab products were launched from these countries.

2013 also saw a further increase in security issues around mobiles, with a new level of maturity in terms of the sophistication and number of these threats. Most malicious mobile apps principally aimed to steal money and subsequently personal data. Android is still the main target, attracting a massive 98.05% of known malware.

Christian Funk, senior virus analyst at Kaspersky Lab, comments: "There is unlikely to be any slowdown in development of malicious apps, especially for Android. To date, the majority of malware has been designed to get access to the device. In the future, there is also a high probability that the first mass worm for Android will appear. Android ticks all the boxes for cyber criminals - it 's a widely-used OS that is easy to use for both app developers and malware authors alike."

Day by day in 2013 Kaspersky Lab detects 315,000 new malicious files every day. Last year's figure was 200,000 each day.

Kaspersky Lab"s products repelled an average of 4,659,920 attacks on users every day when they were online.

Twice as dangerous
The number of browser-based attacks over the last two years has almost doubled to 1,700,870,654.

Kaspersky Lab detected 104,427 new modifications of malicious programs for mobile devices, which is 125% more than in 2012.

In October 2013 alone, it saw 19,966 mobile malware new modifications. That's 50% of the total that Kaspersky Lab found in the whole of 2012, uncovered in a single month.

Who's at the highest risk?
Based on 2013's figures, 15 countries can be assigned to a high risk group, based on their risk level while surfing the Internet. Russia, Austria, Germany, several former Soviet republics and several Asian countries had 41-60% of Kaspersky Lab users reporting attempted web attacks on their computers.

Most popular vulnerable applications exploited by cyber criminals
90.52% of all detected attempts to exploit vulnerabilities targeted Oracle Java. These vulnerabilities are exploited in drive-by attacks conducted via the Internet, and new Java exploits are now present in many exploit packs.

Top malicious programs on the Internet
Seven of the Top 20 malicious programs on the Internet were threats that are blocked during attempted drive-by attacks. This is currently the most common attack method for web-based malware. Kaspersky Lab's ranking includes scripts that redirect to exploits, as well as to the exploits themselves.

Villain of the year
Obad, probably the most remarkable discovery in the mobile field in 2013, is distributed by multiple methods, including pre-established mobile botnets. This is probably the most versatile piece of mobile malware found to date, says Kaspersky, including a staggering total of three exploits, a backdoor, SMS Trojan, and bot capabilities and further functionalities. This could be compared to a Swiss Army knife, as it comprises a whole range of tools.

Local threats
Kaspersky Lab products detected almost 3 billion malware attacks on user computers. A total of 1.8 million malicious and potentially unwanted programs were identified in these attacks.

The full report is available on securelist.com.