Taipei - A Threat to Asia-Pacific’s Cyber Security

Symantec's recent report on global Internet threats claims that Taiwan's Capital, Taipei, with around 186,000 systems infected by bots, was responsible for 9% of all the bot infections during 2008, in Asia-Pacific. In 2007, Taipei accounted for 4% of the overall infections during that year.

In addition, Taiwan has a total of around 250,000 systems infected by bots, 12% of the overall in the Asia-Pacific region by the end of 2008. With this, Taiwan becomes the second largest threat amid all the countries in this region.

Chief technology adviser at Symantec, Nicholas Hsiao, states that the swift escalation in the number of bot-infected computers was the consequence of the easily available optical fiber networks throughout the country, as per the reports by TAIPEI TIMES on April 24, 2009.

Moreover, Nicholas also informed that most attacks that evolved in China can affect Taiwan to a much larger extent as compared to the US attacks. As people of both the countries spoke a common language, it is convenient for Chinese attackers to send e-mails using known words because Taiwanese users are not aware of them.

In the meantime, USA's Information Security Magazine has recently released a list of firms having bot infected systems. The list reveals that several popular sites had been compromised in Taiwan, including online stores, state-of-the-art organizations as well as universities. The Graduate Institute of Information Systems and Applications (National Tsing Hua University) and the leading health and cosmetic retailer of the nation, Watsons were included in the list.

Besides the aforementioned issues, security experts inform that Taiwanese firms also overlooked the gravity of the trouble, thus mounting the risk for the security of their own sites. As the govt. has still not set up any agency to deal the matter, the public is exposed to more web attacks.

Hence, Nicholas suggested that secure online actions as well as using anti-virus software are uniformly significant. Also, repairing system flaws speedily and updating anti-virus softwares, turning off the system and unplugging the Internet cable when not in use may be effective to evade such threats.

Security experts also suggest that computer users in Taiwan should frequently check their systems for viruses. They also caution users about latest and approaching threats that the anti-virus firm has noticed.

Related article: Top Law Enforcement Office Fails to Recognize A phishing E-Mail

» SPAMfighter News - 4/29/2009