Cyber Attacks Expected to Rise in Asia-Pacific

According to the security company 'Symantec', the safety of Internet usage in Asia Pacific is apprehended to go down as people increasingly conduct online transactions and well-organized cyber-criminals emerge with the objective of making quick profits.

Vic Mankotia, Vice-President for Sales and Engineering, Symantec Corp., said Asia Pacific that there is a rapid growth in cyber-attacks in the region through phishing and spam, as reported by TheStar on June 20, 2009.

According to the company's analysts, phishing involves the offensive procedure of trying to steal the private details of end-users like credit card information, usernames and passwords, while spam essentially refers to mass unwanted or uninvited e-mail messages that are dispatched to attract users' attention.

Mankotia also revealed that India and China of late had been the countries suffering from increased cyber-attacks owing to their gigantic number of people and growing Internet connectivity. In 2008, he observed, China had more subscribers for broadband than the United States, the country with the world's greatest users of the same.

Besides, the nation also had the most number of cyber-attacks with the maximum number of bot-infected PCs. During 2008, there was also a worldwide detection of 1.6 Million vicious codes, a rise of 265% from 2007, revealed Mankotia.

Mankotia further stated that he apprehended an increase in web-based assaults in Malaysia due to increasing broadband usage. Moreover, Symantec in its most recent Internet Security Threat Report ranked Malaysia as the second country in South-East Asia with most web-based assaults and the third country with most bot-infected PCs during 2008.

Symantec also indicated that there existed increased instances of sophisticated and well-organized web-based offenses such as hacking and capturing of sensitive data targeting credit card firms, financial institutions and telecommunications organizations.

Explaining why there were increased web-based attacks, Symantec stated that inadequately protected information and infrastructure, inadequately managed end-points as well as absence of IT rules all created opportunities for the attacks. Also, increases in staff retrenchment and salary freezes during the ongoing economic recession had given rise to disgruntled ex-employees who seized valuable data and sensitive information from their erstwhile working places.

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» SPAMfighter News - 7/2/2009