Blog websites are most vulnerable to malware

Threat of infection of mobile devices continues to grow, although small when compared to personal computers.

Dubai: Users are more likely to be infected by a computer software virus while viewing a blog than any other website.

This is according to the latest Internet Security Threat Report, compiled by software protection company Symantec, released on Wednesday.

The report also found that websites with religious or ideological (political) content were more infected with a computer virus — malware — than pornographic sites. Only 2.4 per cent of adult sites were found to be infected, compared to 20 per cent of blog websites.

"We hypothesise that this is because pornographic website owners make money from the internet and have a vested interested in keeping their sites malware-free," Justin Doo, security practice director at Symantec Mena, said in a webinar.

Pornographic sites ranked 10th in the list of categories of sites that are most infected, after automotive themed sites (8th) and health and medicine sites (9th). "2011 was the first year that mobile malware presented a tangible threat to businesses and consumers, with threats primarily aimed at data collection, the sending of content and user tracking," Doo said. However, threats to mobiles still significantly trail personal computers in terms of actual attacks.

The growth of the And-roid platform has been phenomenal and this has not gone unnoticed by cyber criminals who have discovered it to be a lucrative target for malware.

Need for vigilance

"Organisations of all sizes need to be vigilant about protecting their information as we are seeing a large increase in attacks on mobile devices, targeting sensitive data," Doo said.

Stolen credit card details may go for as little as 40-80 US cents. Malware that sends "premium SMS text messages can pay the author $9.99 (Dh36.70) for each text and victims not watching their phone bill could pay the cybercriminal countless times," he said. Google had to remove over 100 malicious apps from the official Android market, Google Play, last year.

"Cyber criminals are finding it very convenient to distribute their malware straight to a mobile device and we have detected a big increase in the use of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to target Android users," Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer at AVG, said.

As workers are bringing their smartphones and tablets into the corporate environment, data breaches are expected to rise as "lost mobile devices present risks to information if not properly protected," he said.

"We're seeing attackers trying out different techniques on smartphones to see what works for them, to see which ones are going to make them money," Ben-Itzhak said.

One bright note in the report is that spam levels dropped considerably in 2011, from 88.5 per cent of all e-mail in 2010 to 75.1 per cent in 2011. Symantec said that on average, 42 million spam messages were in global circulation per day in 2011, compared with 66.1 billion per day in 2010.

Gulf countries improve rankings

Gulf countries have improved their global rankings in the 2011 Internet Security Report due to governments' strict regulations and close watch on the internet.

"UAE is ranked 46th compared to 36th in 2010 and the country is expected to improve further this year," Justin Doo, security practice director at Symantec Mena, told Gulf News.

He said the spam rate in the UAE stood at 73 per cent in 2011, compared to the global spam rate of 75.1 per cent. The spam rate in the UAE in March 2012 stood at 65.6 per cent compared to global spam rate of 64.5 per cent.

The report showed the US is still ranked number one, followed by China, India, Brazil and Germany.