Germany Host To 15% of Vicious Urls

Security researchers belonging to Avira an anti-virus firm in Germany have lately studied the URLs believed to be used in the distribution of malware and phishing across the world. Accordingly, the findings indicate that an overall 15% of malevolent URLs have their origin in Germany.

Manager of International Software Development Sorin Mustaca of Avira said the firm's statistics reveal that 15.04% of all the malware and 14.43% of all the phishing URLs are hosted on German servers. SoftPedia published this on May 26, 2009.

Moreover, according to the officials at Avira, as the total number of individuals using the Internet for services such as online banking is significantly large in Germany, the number of cyber offenses is also sure to rise. Consequently, Avira explains that identity thieves view German citizens as highly convenient to prey on and therefore are their much preferred targets. In fact, the Germans are commonly found to lose their credentials in online scams, particularly phishing.

Meanwhile, Avira reports that banking information belonging to 1.2m citizens was put up for sale during 2008. Also, cyber criminals such as the Internet scammers who gave away the data for cash said they possessed 21m additional details of the same kind that they priced for $15m.

Moreover, based on the above facts, it is believed that Germany occupies the 2nd position following the U.S. (31.90%) and preceding Brazil (7.59%) so far as hosting the most vicious URLs is concerned. Other nations that too appear among the top group comprise France (7.34%) and Spain (4.56%).

Further, during its research Avira as well revealed the companies that were most attacked. Accordingly, the institutions or companies whose customers were targeted included Chase Bank attacked with 18,866 threats, American Express (4,859 threats), Abbey Bank (3.092 threats), eBay (9,655 threats) and PayPal (14,438 threats).

Meanwhile, Avira states that in addition to analyzing these vicious threats, it has also notified the companies that the URLs they were using were actually malevolent and that the security firm was scrutinizing them. The scrutiny, according to the vendor, would help the related companies to adopt measures towards the purification of their links.

Related article: Germany Restricts Anti-Hacking Legalization

» SPAMfighter News - 6/3/2009