The research turns up the interesting fact that more than 50% of malware detected during March was accounted for as trojans, which is impressive when you think of the many attack vectors used by cybercriminals and black hat hackers alike.
Sunbelt's analysis, which is compiled from monthly scans performed by the firm's IT security systems and software, shows that new entries to the list included the INF.Autorun virus and the BehavesLike.Win32.Malware virus in, respectively, fifth and sixth spots.
Other detections with a significant change in March included the Exploit.PDF-JS.Gen virus, which saw its percentage of total detections grow by almost 50% and Trojan.Win32.Generic.pak.cobra, which saw a significant drop in its share from 3.37 to 1.37% of all detections.
Tom Kelchner, Sunbelt's research centre manager, said that good antivirus defence requires not only up-to-the-minute detections of malware, but fast detection as well.
"Generic and behaviour-based detections help [our IT security software] nail a lot of the polymorphic variants and newly created malicious code", he said.