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Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Oman are all high-risk countries for online threats, with 41% to 60% of unique users subject to web attacks, according to the latest IT Threat Evolution report by Kaspersky Lab.
Other countries in this group include Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Sudan and Belarus. Newcomers to this high threat level group for Q2 2011 are Sudan and Saudi Arabia, while Kazakhstan dropped down a level.
The US is very close to joining the high threat level group with 40.2% of unique users subject to web attacks, due to the number of fake anti-virus detections, according to Kaspersky.
The average risk group which features countries with 21% to 41% of unique users subject to web threats featured 94 countries including: China (34.8%), the UK (34.6%), Brazil (29.6%), Peru (28.4%), Spain (27.4%), Italy (26.5%), France (26.1%), Sweden (25.3%) and the Netherlands (22.3%).
Only 28 countries featured as safe-surfing regions and included Switzerland (20.9%), Poland (20.2%), Singapore (19.6%) and Germany (19.1%).
In the second quarter of 2011, five countries left this group, including Finland which entered a higher risk group with 22.1%
India was one of the top 10 countries in which users' computers ran the highest risk of local infection.
Every second computer in the country was at risk of local infection at least once in the past three months.
"Over the last few years, India has been growing steadily more attractive to cybercriminals as the number of computers in the country increases steadily. Other factors that attract the cybercriminals include a low overall level of computer literacy and the prevalence of pirated software that is never updated," said Yury Namestnikov, senior virus analyst at Kaspersky Lab. "Botnet controllers see India as a place with millions of unprotected and unpatched computers which can remain active on zombie networks for extended periods of time."
The five safest countries to access the internet in are: Japan (with 8.2% of unique users affected), Germany (9.4%), Denmark (9.7%), Luxembourg (10%) and Switzerland (10.3%).
Adobe and Oracle were the only two companies to feature in the Top 10 rating of vulnerabilities, with seven of those 10 vulnerabilities being found in Adobe Flash Player, according to Kaspersky Lab.
Microsoft products have disappeared from this ranking due to improvements in the automatic Windows update mechanism and the growing proportion of users who have Windows 7 installed on their PCs.
The number of fake antivirus programmes detected globally by Kaspersky Lab in Q2 2011 began to increase, with the number of users whose computers blocked attempts to install counterfeit software increased 300% in just three months.
The number of mobile threats targeting various mobile platforms is also increasing exponentially with detected threats running on J2ME doubling during Q2 2011.
The number of detections of malicious programmes targeting Android nearly tripled.
Source: ITP
