A slight increase in the number of known viruses

It appears that there has been an order-of-magnitude change in the number of known viruses.

To add further empirical proof to the theory that evil never rests, we have assembled a chart delineating the increase in the number of viruses known to Bitdefender throughout the past four years.

Unsurprisingly, the numbers go up, up, up, 16-fold in all. The data does not quite fit an exponential increase, although there’s an interesting inflexion point a couple of years in that we can’t quite explain – it seems the virus writers got even more productive around that time, for some reason.

So, here’s the chart. The numbers on the vertical axis represent the ratio by which the number of known viruses has increased as compared to the first data point (represented as having value=1), while the horizontal axis represents days elapsed: