Security researchers at McAfee Labs recorded 200 new threats a minute, or more than three every second, in 2013.
The report said the cybercrime industry was largely responsible for making attacks possible, from the purchase of point-of-sale malware to the anonymous sale and monetisation of stolen credit card numbers.
"What happened to the millions of credit card numbers stolen from Target? We have tracked these and continue to see them appear in large lots (dumps) in key ‘carding’ marketplaces. Typically the thieves will drop data in batches of one million to four million numbers," the report said.
The breaches will have long-lasting repercussions, according to the report, which anticipates seeing changes to security approaches and compliance mandates, and lawsuits.
"But the big lesson is that we face a healthy and growing cybercrime industry which played a key role in enabling and monetizing the results of these attacks," the report said.
McAfee Labs collected 2.47 million new Android samples in 2013, with 744,000 in the current quarter alone.
The figure marks a 197% increase on the number collected in 2012 and the volumes of new ransomware levels also doubled since the fourth quarter of 2012 to two million in Q4 2013.
