Asia Scores High For Malware
Statistics from anti-virus firm Sophos have shown three Asian countries are amongst the world’s top 10 top malware hosting countries.
China, South Korea and Thailand represented a combined total of 17.2% of the world’s malware, an accolade that is nothing to be proud of. Malware is responsible for passing computer viruses and infections to innocent computer users who visit an infected website.
The US topped with overall global list with 37.4%, with Russia placed second (12.8%) while China, in third, ranked highest in Asia with 11.2% of the world’s malware.
South Korea scored 2.8% (sixth place overall) while Thailand (eighth) is responsible for hosting 2% of the world’s malware.
On the positive side, China’s score is a considerable improvement given its recent history.
China’s drop down the chart continues a trend set in 2008, when its figure had dropped from 51.4% in 2007.
The results are published as part of Sophos latest report as detailed below.
The graph of the Top 10 malware-hosting countries comes from Sophos’s latest Security Threat Report, exploring the last 12 months of attacks against computers and what the future might hold for threats.
Every day Sophos discovers over 50,000 newly infected webpages, and its findings reveal that the problem of compromised websites is truly global.
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I even once caught a virus from a Thai website, luckily could remove it manually as the virus scanner was no help with that critter. There are lots of badly maintained websites – I usually look at those from the local government entities, and these are often set up and then left alone. Spammers fill the forums nobody uses anyway, and hackers insert their malware links into the unsafe old versions of the content management system. But even the website Thai Senate, the upper house of the parliament, is spreading malware (see the Google safety warning), and that already since at least December, and no webmaster seems to bother about it.
@Andy,
Interesting example. Funnily enough minutes after posting this a blog I often visit was down with malware, so widespread is the problem.
Web hosting certainly seems less professional, even down to contact email address often being @hotmail.com or another free provider. Don’t see this changing anytime soon though.
Thanks for your valuable comment.
But usually they can omit the contact email anyway – in my experience it is the big exception to ever get an answer to an inquiry. And I doubt it is only because I cannot write in Thai (yet) and have to write in English, as there are also many email addresses which directly bounce, as if they were never really created.
@Andy
Absolutely! It feels like there is a big black hole in Thai cyberspace, a lot of my emails have ended up there I think. Is just another symptom of, at times, poor web management in Thailand.