Top 10 malware website countries revealed
Kaspersky Lab’s latest security report reveals that navigating the web remains the riskiest activity on the Internet with malicious URLs that serve exploit kits, bots and ransomware Trojans being the most frequently detected objects (65.44%) online.
Interestingly, 87% of the websites used to spread malicious programs were concentrated in just 10 countries.
The first two places in this particular “top 10” were occupied by the US (28.53%) and Russia (15.99%).
The Netherlands leads the way in reducing the number of malicious hosting sites: compared to the previous quarter, its share has fallen by 4.3% to 7.57%.
This is down primarily to the efforts of the Dutch police and includes the neutralising of botnets such as Bredolab and Rustock.
Online threats
Kaspersky Lab experts have divided countries into groups according to their local infection levels which include:
- High-risk countries (41-60% unique users subject to web attacks). This group includes: Oman, Russia, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Belarus. Newcomers to this group in Q2 were Sudan and Saudi Arabia, while Kazakhstan dropped down a level.
- Average risk group (21-41%). This group was made up of 94 countries, including: the US (40.2%), China (34.8%), the UK (34.6%), Brazil (29.6%), Peru (28.4%), Spain (27.4%), Italy (26.5%), France (26.1%), Sweden (25.3%) and the Netherlands (22.3%). It is particularly noteworthy that the US, at 40.2%, is very close to joining the high-risk group of countries due to the increase in the number of FakeAV detections.
- Safe-surfing countries (11.4-21%). This group comprised 28 countries and included Switzerland (20.9%), Poland (20.2%), Singapore (19.6%) and Germany (19.1%). In the second quarter of 2011, five countries left this group, including Finland which entered a higher risk group with 22.1%
Local threats
India was among the top 10 countries in which users’ computers ran the highest risk of local infection. Every second computer in the country was at risk of local infection at least once in the past three months.
The five safest countries, in terms of the level of local infections, are: Japan (with 8.2% of unique users affected), Germany (9.4%), Denmark (9.7%), Luxembourg (10%) and Switzerland (10.3%).
Vulnerability monopoly
For the very first time in its history, the Top 10 rating of vulnerabilities includes products from just two companies: Adobe and Oracle (Java), with seven of those 10 vulnerabilities being found in Adobe Flash Player alone.
Microsoft products have disappeared from this ranking due to improvements in the automatic Windows update mechanism and the growing proportion of users who have Windows 7 installed on their PCs.
Loading ...