Malware has a nasty habit of popping up just about everywhere we dare to tread on the World Wide Web. In fact, it’s pretty much a given that so long as you have a computer and an internet connection, there will be worms, Trojans and viruses attempting to worm their way inside your computer.

But have you ever wondered where these nasty little things come from?

According to AlienVault, the majority of it hails from China. Based on 95,249 email addresses analyzed, it seems that the PRC is the world’s epicenter for malicious programs. That China comes out on top might have been quite predictable, but guess who comes in second place? That’s right, the good old United States of America, with 60,346 IPs listed as being malicious – streets ahead of third place South Korea, who only listed 16,115.

AlienVault’s revealing infographic tells us much more than just who is responsible for the most malware however – it also gives us plenty of insights into how it is delivered to unsuspecting hard drives. It turns out that direct injection of viruses (when the virus is not disguised) is very rare. Much more common is to hide the virus in an otherwise innocent-looking file, the most common of which is the .exe file.

HTML content, which is found in pretty much every website, and also emails, also carries a large share of the malware distributed around the world, while other common delivery vehicles include ZIP, RAR, PDF and Flash files.

While malware is becoming increasingly more prevalent on Macs (no doubt as cyber criminals look to exploit the myth that they’re invulnerable to viruses), the Windows operating system is still by far and away the biggest victim – according to AlienVault, who analyzed more than five million suspicious URLs to find this out, the top five malwares in the world are all Windows viruses.

The five million URLs analysed is but a fraction of the billions of websites around the world of course, but it does represent a large enough sample to give us a clear picture of just how widespread the malware problem is. AlienVault said that it received almost 30 million entries from its users, and of these just over a million were found to be malicious.

AlienVault aggregated the data from its Open Threat Exchange over a five month period from Feb 20 to July 20. Data was received from both AlienVault’s Open Source Security Information Management (OSSIM) platform, and also its customers.