AV vendors, in fierce competition for users, should remember that cooperation is key in fighting malware, a top Microsoft security official said Friday.

Data sharing between vendors has resulted in a drop in the overall number of malware families affecting computers, said Dennis Batchelder, director of the Microsoft Malware Protection Center, at a conference of the Association of Antivirus Asia Researchers in Sydney.

The numbers of computers encountering one of those top 20 families of malware have dropped from 24 million a month to 13 million a month over the last two years, he said.

Batchelder said the data covers broad-spectrum malware and not mobile threats or so-called “advanced persistent threats,” a label usually attached to more sophisticated, targeted attacks.

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