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United States Leads in Cyber Attack Traffic

1.6 cyber attacks launched for every PC in the country this year

Jul 5, 2010 16:53 GMT  ·  By
1.6 cyber attacks launched for every PC in the U.S.
   1.6 cyber attacks launched for every PC in the U.S.

According to a study performed by Atlanta-based security company SecureWorks, the United States is responsible for the largest number of attempted cyber attacks in the last six months, with rate of 1.6 incidents for every PC in the country. Meanwhile, India is the most “peaceful” nation, with an attacks-per-PC ratio of 0.05.

SecureWorks collected data on cyber attacks attempted against its customers from January 2010 to July 2010. It then broke down the numbers by IP address origin and factored in the estimated number of PCs for each country to reveal some interesting results. The study only took the top 16 countries, by number of PCs into consideration.

China, is only in the seventh place, despite having the biggest number of PCs after the United States. This is somewhat surprising because people constantly point their fingers at China for hosting a large number of vulnerable PCs that are controlled to attack others. According to SecureWorks, a number of 20,622,543 cyber attacks originated in China during the past six months. Considering the estimated 102,700,000 PCs in the country, that's 201 attacks for every 1000 computers, or a 0.2 ratio.

Meanwhile, U.S. has an estimated number of 265,700,000 PCs and accounts for a whooping 441,003,516 attempted cyber attacks during the same period. That means 1660 for every 1000 computers, or over 1.6 for every PC. South Korea, came next with a ratio of almost 0.8, which is only half of United States'.

The country with the best score was India, with only one attempted cyber attack for every 20 PCs in the country - a 0.05 ratio. Russia (0.52), Taiwan (0.3), Canada (0.29), Japan (0.21), China (0.2), Spain (0.15), Mexico (0.13), Italy (0.13), United Kingdom (0.1), France (0.1), Brazil (0.08), Germany (0.07) and The Netherlands (0.05), follow U.S. and South Korea in order.

"The reasons for the difference in number of attempted attacks per country could comprise many things - this ranges from the overall Internet speeds in a country and how proactive the ISPs are in protecting their clients to general user education on security. The ratio of Windows, Mac and Linux users in a country will also make a big difference," Jon Ramsey, CTO for SecureWorks, commented for Help Net Security.

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