PandaLabs - the research arm of Panda Security - has recorded five million new strains of malware in the last three months and, said the IT security company, a sizeable slice of these were banking trojans.
PandaLabs said that trojans took a 38% share of all malware infections, adware was responsible for 18.68%, and worms 14%.
Drilling down through the PandaLabs malware report reveals that Taiwan had the most active infections at 29%, closely followed by the US and the UK, which both had around 25%.
The risk of malware infection continues to worsen, with the report noting: "We are currently receiving some 50 000 new examples of malware everyday, this compares to 37 000 just a few months ago".
"There is no reason to believe that the situation will improve in the coming months", said Luis Corrons, PandaLabs' technical director.
According to the quarterly IT security report, cybercriminals took no holidays during the summer and, at the beginning of July, the creators of the malware Waledac (aka Storm Worm) took advantage of the Independence Day celebrations in the US to launch a campaign to infect users.
In that malware attack, PandaLabs said potential victims were tricked into visiting a fake YouTube website showing what was supposed to be a 4th of July celebration video.
"As is usually the case with this type of attack, users that wanted to watch the video were displayed a message informing them that they had to install a codec to do so. However, this codec was in reality the Waledac worm", said the report.
"Once infected, the victim's computer sent out email messages aimed at causing other users to fall into the same trap."
Some days after the Waledac worm was released, Panda said that a new zero day vulnerability was discovered which affected the Microsoft Video ActiveX Control.
"We found a dozen China-based web pages that exploited this vulnerability. Soon after the vulnerability was revealed, Microsoft published a fix for the flaw."