Dubai - City with Majority Botnets in the Middle East

According to security experts at Symantec, Dubai is a city in the Middle East that hosts the highest number of botnets.

Describing a botnet, the experts said it is a network of hijacked PCs that spammers command-and-control for transmitting malware or spam to other systems without letting their owners know about it.

Meanwhile, Symantec's most recent Internet Security Threat Report discovered that during 2008, the Middle East hosted 644,126 unique bot-infected PCs, with a mean of 5,743 bots for each day of the year. Dubai alone was responsible for a total 6%, making the city the most affected place within the region.

Although majority of attacks against the EMEA countries emanated from the US, a large volume of attacks emanated from Dubai as well. Moreover, the UAE climbed up to the tenth spot in 2008 from the 43rd position it occupied in 2007 in terms of launching attacks.

This increase, according to the report, might simply have been on account of considerable broadband usage in the last few years. In fact, broadband subscriptions within the UAE have increased almost 900% since 2005, states the report.

The report also reveals that Saudi Arabia suffered the largest incidences of worm infections in the entire EMEA region that is a considerable shift from the country's earlier rank of No13.

Symantec claims that this rise is due to an increase in 'Digital Subscriber Line' (DSL) penetration in Saudi Arabia together with the 'mabezat' virus' widespread infection that started in Saudi Arabia itself. The Company's experts commented that unlike previously when the Middle East was a victim, it joined the league of players creating and releasing computer worms.

There is great concern that botnet-operations are not declining although researchers are doing everything possible to lessen them.

Accordingly, specialists at the 2009 RSA Conference said that all the efforts by the IT industry and the authorities prosecuting criminals were not proving competent to tackle the botnet-operators.

Nevertheless, security specialists noted that the global IT security group was innovating more methods to defeat spammers while concentrating on protection from attacks rather than on spotting and suing the attackers.

Related article: DBA Pleads Guilty of Stealing Certegy Customer Records

» SPAMfighter News - 5/6/2009