Redwood City, California, United States, June 30, 2020 – Avast (LSE:AVST), a global leader in digital security and privacy products, today revealed that the overall chance of home users encountering a cyberthreat has increased, worldwide. According to the Avast Global PC Risk Report 2020, home users have a 25.6% chance of encountering any type of PC malware, up from 20.1% the previous year. 

Home users have a 6.7% chance of being targeted by an ‘advanced’ threat, a 20% increase compared to the year before, where the risk ratio was 5.6%. Avast defines advanced threats as new, not yet before seen threats, designed to bypass common protection technologies included in security software, such as signatures, heuristics, emulators, URL filtering, and email scanning. 

In the United States, the likelihood of a home user coming across any type of threat increased 49% within a year, from 13.8% to a 20.5% chance of encountering a threat. Americans have a 5.0% probability of facing an advanced threat, an increase of 34% from the previous year where the risk ratio was 3.7%.

“Our 2020 reports shows that the risk ratio has increased worldwide for all threats. The number of connected devices continues to increase dramatically and this report illustrates how computers remain vulnerable as they form an important  part of the attack chain, ” said Luis Corrons, Security Evangelist at Avast. “Cybercriminals create threats that take advantage of the activities carried out by home users, and exploit their potential lack of cybersecurity awareness and cautiousness, making it vital for everyone to install a reliable security solution on all devices possible.”

The top 10 countries in which home users are most at risk of encountering any type of threat changed slightly from 2018 to 2019, with Venezuela, Algeria, Saint Lucia, Yemen, and Angola replacing Ethiopia, Egypt, Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar.

Methodology 

The data included in this report is collected from Avast’s threat detection network, and represents the threats Avast protected its PC users from September 8, 2019 and October 7, 2019. In order to provide statistically relevant data, this report includes data from countries, territories and regions with a sample size of at least 10,000 computers belonging to home users that encountered threats during the month we collected the data. The data looks at total threats and advanced threats, evaluating the risk ratio for home users around the world.

To calculate the risk ratios for this report, the number of computers where Avast’s protection layers stopped at least one threat were divided by the total number of computers Avast actively protected within the 30-day period.