May 10, 2011 16:21 GMT  ·  By

Cyber criminals are increasingly moving their servers and infrastructure to Canada possibly in an attempt to profit from the country's good cyber reputation.

According to statistics compiled by web and messaging security vendor Websense, Canada is rapidly becoming a hotbed for cyber crime.

For example, the country saw a whooping 319% increase in the number of servers hosting phishing sites in 2010.

That's one of the highest increases registered for any country in the world and was topped only by Egypt.

The number of botnet command and control (C&C) servers has also gone up by 53% in the past eight months, according to Websense's data.

This growth has placed Canada in the number two spot among the top five most botnet-friendly countries, after the United States and before France, Germany and China.

In addition, while the number of malicious websites is decreasing globally, the rate at which it declines in Canada is much slower than in the previously mentioned countries.

In Websense's 2010 Threat Report, Canada ranked as the 13th most cybercrime-friendly country judged by volume of hosted crimeware.

From data gathered in 2011 so far, the country has jumped to the sixth position. The top ten list is: US, France, Russia, Germany, China, Canada, Netherlands, South Korea, Romania and UK.

One likely explanation for this trend is the increased scrutiny of IP addresses from regions and countries known to be safehavens for cyber crime.

The fact that most Chinese hosting companies are not responding to abuse complaints might be overshadowed by the fact that network-level filtering and scanning solutions have rules to treat Chinese IP addresses with suspicion.

A large data transfer towards a Chinese IP might suggest a trojan infection somewhere on the network, while a similar transfer toawards a Canadian IP might pass unnoticed.

"IP addresses in China and Eastern Europe are highly scrutinized and undergoing intense evaluation. So hackers are on a quest to move their networks to countries, like Canada, that have better cyber reputations," concludes Patrik Runald, senior manager of security research at Websense.