Most cyber attacks target the U.S.

SecureWorks announced the findings of a research study that analyzed where the greatest number of attempted cyber attacks were launching from across the globe at its 2,800 clients.

India won the study by having the lowest number of attempted cyber attacks originating from computers within its borders with only 52 attacks per thousand PCs. The Netherlands ended in second place with 57 attacks per thousand PCs, narrowly beating Germany and Brazil who came in third and fourth place respectively. The UK came in sixth place and the USA came in at the bottom of the table with a total of 1,660 attempted attacks per thousand computers.

“The reasons for the difference in number of attempted attacks per country could comprise many things – this ranges from the overall Internet speeds in a country and how proactive the ISPs are in protecting their clients to general user education on security. The ratio of Windows, Mac and Linux users in a country will also make a big difference,” said Jon Ramsey, CTO for SecureWorks.

Don Smith, VP of Engineering and Technology, SecureWorks commented: “The result of a successful cyber attack on organizations can be dramatic and range from the loss of intellectual property, productivity and revenue to possible dented shareholder or consumer confidence in the event of disclosure.”

Traditional methods such as firewalls and anti-virus software should be combined with intrusion prevention services, access control, data encryption, tokenization, vulnerability scans, network segmentation and log monitoring to perform a rich analysis of networks and effectively protect systems.

The SecureWorks study analysed the locations of attempted cyber attacks on its global client base between January 2010 and June 2010 and compared this with the total number of active PCs in that country. The countries with the top 16 numbers of active computers were then filtered to reveal standardized results.