Over 80% of all Chinese PCs Infected With Viruses

Chinese antivirus solutions provider, Rising, has published its latest statistics on website monitoring that suggest a growing trend of websites being plagued by phishers and viruses in the recent past. The security company reported that there were 6.83 Million access attempts to websites infected with malicious viruses in just a single day on January 20, 2009.

Viruses are increasingly spreading because computer users are excessively downloading content from the Web. Rising reported that about 85% of all PCs in China host a virus and this rate is expected to rise as the total number of people using the Internet in the country rises in coming years.

In fact, the prediction seems true as most of the computer viruses and worms originate in China. The latest worm has been the Conficker virus, which reportedly scattered to more than 80 countries, particularly lethal in Mexico, USA, Brazil, Spain and Taiwan.

Apart from phishers and virus distributors in China, the country harbors a vast number of hacking groups, said many security companies including Rising. These groups are professional gangs of criminals who spy on corporate networks and conduct their malicious operations through computer trojans and viruses. Furthermore, China has a large number of unpatched computers and cyber criminals worldwide exploit these computers by establishing base here to launch attacks against other countries.

In fact, Chinese netizens' PCs might be having Trojan downloaders or trojans meant to steal data from online games to capture users' login information, according to Rising. Simultaneously, Rising warns that certain well-known ticket websites such as Piaocn.com have malicious code embedded on them. Once a visitor accesses these sites, his computer downloads numerous account-stealing viruses from the Internet, resulting in loss of login details for Internet games, QQ Instant Message accounts as well as online bank accounts.

However, to avoid these destructive trojans and viruses, Rising advises users to activate their Trojan block feature and keep their antivirus software up-to-date. Additionally, users should install patches on their systems and look out for the Chinese URLs that end with inconsistent .CN domain when using online search engines.

Related article: Opera 9.1 Browser Introduces phishing Alert

» SPAMfighter News - 2/10/2009