Bahraini Cyber Community at High Cybercrime Threat

Security company, Trend Micro, has recently warned that Internet community in Bahrain is at high threat from the rising cybercrime. The security firm has sterilized over a million infected PCs throughout the Middle East during Q1 2009, out of which, 159,228 were located in Bahrain.

Additionally, with the global spam level peaking at 200 Billion per day, the country is further expected to see a significant growth in the number of malware infected systems.

Security researchers believe that high Internet use in Bahrain is the prime reason behind the increase in the nation's cybercrime. As far as the figures by Trend Micro are concerned, Internet usage in the country has increased 525%, which indicates that currently 34.8% Bahrainis are susceptible to cybercrime.

Supporting the aforementioned fact, Chris Moore, Managing Director for Trend Micro Middle East, stated that Bahrain is one of the Arab countries having highest Internet usage, and businesses and individuals in Bahrain are highly vulnerable to cyber attacks, which could lead to financial loss, as reported by Trade Arabia on April 28, 2009.

Cyber crooks have compromised several web pages (numbering in thousands) that belonged to leading companies in the Middle East, government organizations, educational institutes and various other popular sites, which used to receive heavy user-traffic. Moreover, this scenario is despite large Internet security expenses made by the country.

International Data Corp. (IDC) revealed that the region's overall Internet security expenditure is expected to reach around $9.3 Million by 2009; UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain being the leading investors.

Further, Bahraini Ministry of Interior's cybercrime expert highlighted that cyber piracy, e-fraud incidents and e-mail thefts accounted for 13%, 10% and 7% of all the cybercrime incidents registered in 2008.

Security experts said that the curiosity of few people to obtain the sensitive details of other people and easy availability of spying and hacking software are the major reasons for the expansion in cybercrime. Thus, it's high time to safeguard the cyber world as businesses could not bear the loss of data and productivity on account of mounting cybercrime.

Related article: Bahraini Internet Forum Suffers Intrusion

» SPAMfighter News - 5/5/2009