> There's definitely something 'off' with the data if it can drop 91% in a quarter then pick up 117% in another. Not necessarily. If an exploited vulnerability

> There's definitely something 'off' with the data if it can drop 91% in a quarter then pick up 117% in another. Not necessarily. If an exploited vulnerability is discovered and patched, you easily could observe such a dramatic trend. Or if a state sponsored one campaign ends, you also see a similar trend. Now linux did have some very serious CVE's patched in 2022. On numerous occasions. Patch now campaigns can wipe out successful malware very quickly. The the 90+% drop is an order of magnitude change and indeed 'big' but the subsequent 100+% increase is only a change by roughly 2x (less than half an order of magnitude). The numbers for windows (~50x more popular than linux) were in millions, and the numbers for linux detections in the 100k's and tens of thousands: quote: >> Most new Linux malware samples (854,690) were seen in the first quarter of 2022. But in the second quarter, new malware samples dropped by almost 3% to 833,065.> >> Those Linux detection numbers plummeted again in the third quarter of last year by a staggering 91% to 75,841. But they picked up again in the fourth quarter of 2022, growing by 117% to 164,697.