Australian malware detection rose by around 1.3 million within the space of a month, amid a global rise in threats.
According to Trend Micro findings, the figure rose from 6.7 million in April to eight million in May, placing Australia in third spot behind the US (ranked first) and Japan (second).
Research from TrendLabs also signalled a four per cent increase in threats during May, rising to 3.7 billion globally with email threats dominating - making up 83 per cent of the overall threats blocked.
Malicious files significantly increased during the month with the report indicating 520 million malicious files blocked from infecting endpoints and URLs - TrendLabs identified a detection rate of 1408 threats blocked per second.
“In today’s hyper-connected society, businesses need to prepare and respond more quickly than ever before to data breaches," said Jon Oliver, senior data scientist at Trend Micro.
"To do this, they need to build security into everything they do, and ensure that defences are up-to-date and equipped to tackle the sophisticated attacks our TrendLabs are identifying month-on-month."
With regards to vulnerabilities by vendor, Adobe remained on top with 35 incidents discovered in May, while Microsoft numbers dropped, and no Apple vulnerabilities were detected, the report said.
WannaCry remained in poll position, accounting for 59,000 ransomware attacks while coin-mining malware rose from 1.7 million in April to 2.4 million in May.
Meanwhile in April, a hacker group identified as Orangeworm had been targeting the healthcare sector in several countries since 2015 installing a custom backdoor called Trojan.Kwampirs within large international organisations with operations in the US, Europe and Asia.
Trojan.Kwampirs is a Trojan horse able to open a backdoor on a computer and may also download malicious files - it was first discovered in August 2016 and affects Windows systems.
