UK among world’s worst for malware

The UK ranks among the world’s worst offending countries for cyber attacks, a new study has found.

The latest E-Threat Landscape Report, compiled by BitDefender, found that the UK has the third highest number of firms hosting phishing pages. Only Russia and China were found to be worse, coming second and first respectively.

The UK came fourth in the rankings of pages hosting malware, with six per cent found to be infected.

The report examined data from January-June 2010, analysing malware and spam trends. Developments include a six per cent global decline in phishing messages, and Windows Autorun-based threats now accounting for more than 15 per cent of malware.

Catalin Cosoi, head of the BitDefender Online Threats Lab, believes social networks in particular will continue to be a target for cyber attackers.

“Most of the malware authors will focus on the social networking platform to deliver their newest payloads. Some of these attacks will focus on social engineering tricks (such as launching various malware offensives from compromised computers), while others will try to exploit different vulnerabilities or features already implemented across the platform,” he said.