Back in 2009, when I wrote my pivotal article on which antivirus program is best (which still holds very true by the way), I mentioned the then current figures on new malware samples per month found by AV-test.org. Back then  it was a little over 1 million unique samples per month. The current figures? a bar graph is worth a thousand words (click on it for a bigger version): 

That’s about 5 million new samples per month!!

For data on what to do to stay safe and malware-free despite this rampant escalating numbers, see the article I refer to at the beginning of this one.

This is an old trick, but recently a new wave of attempts have surfaced on this. You’re visiting a website, and either a browser window pop-up message or a window embedded in the page you’re visiting tells you to update to the latest version of Flash Player. The fake windows are also getting better in quality and harder to tell from the legit ones.

If you don’t have Flash set up to update automatically, I encourage you to go straight to the source for updates: http://get2.adobe.com/flashplayer/. Do not act on any pop-up windows luring you to update your Flash Player.

Stay safe.