There have been concerns because the number of detection rules displayed during the scan has decreased after the last update. Some people even suspected we sold out to the bad guys.

The answer is much simpler: optimization. There were a lot of entries that were still backward compatible to 1.2. While they still worked, 1.3 offers more performant methods that will take less space. You can check and compare the list of detected products to see that no detections have been removed (if we had, there would have been way more inconspicuous ways to do so ;-) ).

The number is not exactly the number of files and registry entries detected, it's the number of detection rules. Sometimes there are more than one rule for the same file, but often, one rule covers multiple files/entries.

No Illuminati involved as you can see :-)