Malaysia is 40th place worldwide for online web surfing dangers says Kaspersky

At a recent press event, Kaspersky shared some interesting facts regarding where Malaysia was placed in terms of online threats. In 2016, Kaspersky Lab detected 33,353 distinct Internet-borne malware incidents in Malaysia which puts Malaysia in 40th place worldwide when it comes to the risk of incurring an online malware infection. This usually revolves clicking or accessing sites that inadvertently install malware, trojans and whatnot on your PC. Word to the wise: don’t just click on anything you see online.

In terms of local threats, Kaspersky detected 18,560 local malware incidents. This means that someone picked up a flash drive or other storage media that contains malicious software, plugs it into their PC and gets all manner of nastiness accidentally installed. This number of incidents puts Malaysia in 73rd place worldwide in terms of the risk of incurring local offline threats. Next pro tip: don’t randomly stick flash drives you find into your PC.

Image: Kaspersky

The Big Picture
In terms of the big picture, spam – the kind that clogs your email, not your arteries – continues to remain a problem with 73,066,751 malicious attachments detected in Q3 2016 alone globally with India incurring the lion’s share of spam at 14.02% out of the total amount.

The next biggest problem facing online users are phishing attempts that are becoming even more sophisticated. Kaspersky’s anti-phishing system detected over 37,515,531 attempts in Q3 2016, which is 5.2 million times more than the last quarter. Most phishing attacks are understandably concentrated on corporate concerns especially in terms of finance with 55.90% of attacks focused on this sector along and out of this total 26.13% of phishing attempts were solely focused on banks alone. Social media sites were next up in terms of being in the crosshairs, with Facebook, Yahoo and Amazon.com accounting for 21.96% of detected phishing attempts in Q3 2016. Attacks are also becoming ever more sophisticated as well, with spoofed websites sporting ever more elaborate means to look like the real thing to persuade people to click on them.

The third biggest problem on the radar was, oddly enough, on account of a game: Pokemon Go which spread like wildfire early on this year. Fraudsters banked on the popularity of the game and added malicious code to the app for people to sideload it onto their phones. The fact that the app was launched globally in stages meant that eager players in areas where it wasn’t released yet tried to find ways to sideload it onto their phones by downloading the apk file wherever they could find it. When Pokemon Go launched in Q2 2016, it resulted in over 362,458 malicious installation attempts on mobile devices. In Q3 2016, when the popularity of the game began waning and people became more savvy about sideloaded apps, it dropped down to 152,0931 malicious attempts.

The biggest threat though for 2016 remains ransomware which encrypts files or an entire hard disk and holds the contents up to ransom. Hackers find it a low risk, high profit activity, hence its proliferation to both corporate and private concerns to the point that multiple examples of ransomware have been encountered in the wild written in different programming languages. Examples of ransomware include nasty ones like Mamba, Dcryptor and Xpan. Odds are if you’ve encountered one, you’re up the creek with no paddle unless you fork out cash and even then, it may not necessarily work. Fortunately, Kaspersky has come up with a ransomware decryptor that should be able to deal with the more common ones for free.To find out more, swing by noransom.kaspersky.com.

Image: Kaspersky