Cyber crime: US leads in malicious activity

Bangalore, May 24 (UNI) The United States has the highest proportion of overall malicious activity originating from their cyber networks at 31 per cent, according to the findings of Symantec's Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR)-2006.

Speaking to newspersons here after releasing the XI volume of the report, Symantec India Managing Director Vishal Dhupur said the report, covering the six month period from July one 2006, had for the first time identified the countries with the highest amount of malicious activity originating from their networks. The US was followed by China with ten per cent and Germany seven per cent.

On the Indian scenario, he said Mumbai had the highest number of bot-infected computers, accounting for 38 per cent, followed by 25 per cent in New Delhi and 15 per cent in Bangalore. India was the 14th ranked country in hosting Phishing websites, he added.

Expressing concern over the increase in the number of cyber crimes in India, Mr Dhupur said that as broadband penetration increased, the impact of threats also increased and the level of attacks were getting modular, sophisticated and for financial gain.

Symantec had detected an average of 277 active bot-infected computers per day in India and it was not a welcome sign, he added.

Mr Dhupur said Symantec detected a total of 1,66,248 unique phishing messages, an average of 904 per day, marking a five per cent increase over the first six months of 2006. Throughout 2006, an average of 27 per cent fewer unique phishing messages were detected on weekends than the average of 961 phishing messages on weekdays.

It was also observed that an increase in phishing activity during major holidays and mega events such as FIFA World Cup were observed due to the fact that attackers might find it easier to craft theme specific social engineering attacks surrounding special events.

There was a rise in data theft, data leakage and targeted attacks for financial gain.

He said Symantec observed high levels of coordinated attacks combining spam, malicious code and online fraud. During second half of 2006, spam made up 59 per cent of all monitored e-mail traffic, marking a steady increase over the first six months of 2006 with 30 per cent of the total spam related to financial services industry resulting from an increase in 'pump-and dump' spam.

UNI