The US and China 'harbor' two-thirds of the world security risk

The US and China "harbored" nearly two-thirds of the world's spam, viruses and other computer security risks in 2006.

According to statistics from security firm Sophos, 34.2% of malware (malware) last year originated from the US, while from China was 31%. Russia ranked third with 9.5%.

" The huge computer network in North America makes the US top of the black list not surprising. The United States is also the place to host more than a third of websites that contain malicious code ," Sophos reports. said.

Sophos has identified 207,684 security risks of all kinds in the past year, spread from spam, virus, worm, trojan to ransomware "kidnapping" software. This is a new form of malicious software that specializes in "kidnapping" data by encrypting them and asking victims to "donate" money to hackers if they want to have a password unlocked.

Source: SophosLabs According to the report, up to 90% of the spam is currently being transferred via zombie computers (computers infected with malware and control falls into the hands of hackers without users knowing) .

Once again, the black list of the 12 most spam-dispersed countries in the world recorded the US's reluctant champion. The country accounts for 22% of the total volume of spam sent globally. China continues to finish second with 15.9%.

Some other countries participating in this list are Korea (7.4%), France (5.4%), Spain (5.1%), Poland (4.5%), Brazil (3 , 5%), Italy (3.2%) and Germany (3%).

Sophos predicts that 2007 will see an important shift in cybercrime attacks, as they gradually reduce the use of email and turn to infecting computers with websites.

"The number of websites infected with malware is increasing rapidly. On average, SophosLabs detects an additional 5000 new URLs with malicious code every day ."