Nigeria ranked 65th globally for malicious Internet activities

Posted by admin Headlines Monday, April 18th, 2011

Nigeria has been ranked 65th in malicious Internet activities in 2010 out of the 233 countries monitored globally by the Symantec’s Global Intelligence Network.

Symantec Corporation, a major Internet security solution provider in the world, on Monday, said its Internet Security Threat Report, Volume 16, found Nigeria to have moved up by five steps from its 2009 ranking.

The 2009 version of the same report said Nigeria ranked number 43 in Europe, Middle East and Africa region and 70 in the world for malicious activities.

The new report also showed a massive volume of more than 286 million new threats last year, accompanied by several new mega trends in the threat landscape.

The report highlighted dramatic increases in both the frequency and sophistication of targeted attacks on enterprises; the continued growth of social networking sites as an attack distribution platform; and a change in attackers’ infection tactics, increasingly targeting vulnerabilities in Java to break into traditional computer systems.

The Senior Vice-President, Symantec Security Technology and Response, Mr. Stephen Trilling, said the report explored how attackers were exhibiting a notable shift in focus toward mobile devices.

He noted that targeted attacks, such as Hydraq and Stuxnet, posed a growing threat to enterprises in 2010.

“To increase the likelihood of successful, undetected infiltration into the enterprise, an increasing number of these targeted attacks leveraged zero-day vulnerabilities to break into computer systems. As one example, Stuxnet alone exploited four different zero-day vulnerabilities to attack its targets,” Trilling quoted the report.

He added, “Stuxnet and Hydraq, two of the most visible cyber-events of 2010, represented true incidents of cyber warfare and have fundamentally changed the threat landscape. The nature of the threats has expanded from targeting individual bank accounts to targeting the information and physical infrastructure of nation states.”

In 2010, attackers launched targeted attacks against a diverse collection of publicly traded, multinational corporations and government agencies, as well as a surprising number of smaller companies, the report revealed.

-Punchwp_posts