A Microsoft Security Intelligence report shows that malware persisted to dominate above all other threats in Q3 and Q4 of 2009, as trojans were the most common variety of threat – according to data from over 500 million computers worldwide via Microsoft security products.

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Microsoft collected its data from Forefront, Defender, Malicious Software Removal Tool, Bing and Windows Live Hotmail.

The software giant found that malware was led to be accountable for a whopping 69.9% of all threats detected on those machines infected, which is up by 2.8% on Q1 and Q2 of last year.

With this in mind, Microsoft emphasise that the number of malware-infected PCs dropped down from 4.9 to 4.1 out of each 1,000 units reported.

“The Security Intelligence Report Volume 8 provides compelling evidence that cyber criminals are becoming more sophisticated and packaging online threats to create, update and maintain exploit kits that are sold on to others to deploy,” said Microsoft UK’s head of Privacy and Security, Cliff Evans.  “Malware creators are continually improving their ‘products’ by replacing poorly performing exploits with new ones.”

The report states that the majority of threats faced by corporations can in fact be tracked back to just a handful of crafty botnets, illustrated by the example that just the top 5 botnets of 2009 were responsible for more than 94% of global spam in the same period.