Friday, November 28

Hackers haunting Europe now

JACK KAPICA
Globe and Mail Update


Hackers, it appears, are now forsaking North America in favour of European targets.

In November, said a report from British Internet security specialists at mi2g, Europe overtook North America as the most attacked continent in cyberspace.

Moreover, the successful hacking and distributed denial of service attacks now originate from Brazil, Russia, China and India, the mi2g Intelligence Unit reported in new research. Turkey, Indonesia, Morocco, Pakistan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are also increasingly active.

Successful digital attacks against North America have been dwindling quickly over the past three months.

Germany was the country suffering the most attacks with 2,314, followed by Britain (1,183), the Netherlands (967), Italy (529), Austria (354) and Switzerland (335).

The combined number of attacks — 5,682 — against the European countries far exceeds the overt digital attacks recorded against the United States (3,696) and Canada (209).

Brazil, with 962 attacks, Turkey (549) and China (317) are the only non-Western countries in the top 10.

(snip)

In terms of operating systems, Linux remained the most popular among hackers, according to mi2G, reflecting how popular Linux has become as a platform for Internet-connected computers and servers. Systems running the open-source system accounted for 61.7 per cent of all attacks. Microsoft Windows followed with 23.7 per cent.

But since most government computers run Microsoft systems, Windows servers in governmental operations registered a record high of 84.1 per cent of all successful digital attacks. Government systems running Linux were well below, at 10.1 per cent.

The trend was called a significant shift by mi2g chairman D.K. Matai.

"North America, particularly the United States, has learned from coming under regular digital fire and is now hardened in comparison to Europe," he said in making the announcement.

"Many Europeans do not see themselves as legitimate targets because of their perceived neutrality on the world stage. They are mistaken because evidence shows that criminals and malevolents gravitate toward low-hanging fruit and attack those easy-to-get opportunities ferociously."

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