Cybercrime: Nigeria Ranks 43rd in EMEA

Nigeria has ranked 43rd in Europe Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and 70th in the world in 2009 for malicious activity according to recent internet security report by Symantec a global leader in providing security, storage and systems management solutions.
“Attacks have evolved from simple scams to highly sophisticated espionage campaigns targeting some of the world’s largest corporations and government entities. The scale of these attacks and the fact that they originate from across the world, makes this a truly international problem requiring the cooperation of both the private sector and world government,” Gordon Love, regional director for Africa at Symantec.
According to the report, Egypt was the top-ranked country for viruses while Saudi Arabia was the top-ranked country for worms. Worms are malicious programs that replicate themselves from system to system without the use of a host file. This is in contrast to viruses, which requires the spreading of an infected host file.
The report identified an increase in the number of targeted threats focused on enterprises. It noted that given the potential for monetary gain from compromised corporate intellectual property, cybercriminals have turned their attention towards enterprises. The report found that attackers are leveraging the abundance of personal information openly available on social networking sites to synthesize socially engineered attacks on key individuals within targeted companies.
Also web-based attacks continued to grow unabated. The report identified that, today’s attackers leverage social engineering techniques to lure unsuspecting users to malicious websites. These websites then attack the victim’s web browser and vulnerable plug-ins normally used to view video or document files. In particular, 2009 saw dramatic growth in the number of web-based attacks targeted at PDF viewers; this accounted for 49 percent of observed web-based attacks. This is sizeable increase from the 11 percent reported in 2008.
Among other trends highlighted in the report is the fact that malicious activity takes root in emerging countries. The report saw firm signs that malicious activity is now taking root in countries with an emerging broadband infrastructure, such as South Africa, Brazil, India, Poland, Vietnam and Russia. In 2009, these countries moved up the rankings as a source and target of malicious activity by cybercriminals. The findings from the report suggest that government crackdown in developing countries have led cybercriminals to launch their attacks from the developing world, where they are less likely to be prosecuted.