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More scary cybersecurity research. Intel’s McAfee division released its Fourth Quarter Threats Report on Monday, revealing that malware surpassed the company’s estimate of 75 million unique malware samples last year. More worrying still, mobile malware was on the rise and recorded its busiest ever year, according to McAfee.

“The threat landscape continued to evolve in 2011, and we saw a significant shift in motivation for cyber attacks,” noted Vincent Weafer, senior vice president of McAfee Labs, in a statement. “Increasingly, we’ve seen that no organization, platform or device is immune to the increasingly sophisticated and targeted threats.”

Both 2011 and the fourth quarter were by far the busiest periods for mobile malware that McAfee has seen, it said,  with Google’s Android operating system the largest target for mobile malware writers.