U.S. leads the way in malware and firewall attacks
The US has overtaken India and Russia to become the biggest producer of viruses, according to Network Box. The U.S. is now responsible for 12.05 per cent of the world’s viruses, up from 4.03 per cent from August, when the US trailed both India and Russia.
India takes second place with 7.17 per cent, after its virus production declined by an impressive 6.56 per cent. Russia, which was in third place, has dropped to fifth after a fall of 5.53 per cent, to be replaced by Korea, which saw an increase in production of only 0.27 per cent (reaching 6.29 per cent of virus production).
Viruses produced in the UK have dropped again (by 0.29 per cent). The UK has now dropped from fourth largest producer in July, to tenth in September.
The U.S. and India still dominate when it comes to spam production, being responsible for 10.79 and 6.88 per cent of the worlds spam respectively. Russia has replaced Brazil as the third largest spam producer, after an increase of 2.53 per cent from last month, to 6.04 per cent of the worlds spam.
The majority of firewall attacks still originate from the U.S. (18.65 per cent) in fact there was a slight increase of 0.32 per cent in September.
Simon Heron, internet security analyst for Network Box, says: “As usual, it is ports 80, 137 and 8080 that take the majority of the probes but it is interesting to see probes against TCP 1521 entering the top 10. This port is frequently used by Oracle as a “listener” and also by nCube licence manager. I would suspect it is worth probing in case Oracle is on there and the listener has not been properly secured.”
Heron continues: “The rapidity with which a country can climb, and fall, the threat charts serves as a reminder of the fluidity of the cybercrime industry. Also it is always interesting looking at the ports being probed as these vary dependent on the latest vulnerability or perhaps a knowledge that default settings on some applications do not protect correctly or are not correctly secured.”