Symantec has just published the Internet Security Threat Report XIII which provides a closer analysis of the most important threats occurred between July 1 and December 31, 2007. What's really interesting is the phishing section in which the security company talks about the countries hosting phishing websites, the United States being the clear leader with no less than 66 percent of the total number of phishing pages. China comes in second with 14 percent while Romania is the only European nation among the top three, with 5 percent.

Symantec has published a pretty interesting description about Romania's suspicious and malicious activity on the Internet, which I'm going to reproduce just like it was published in the report:

"Romania ranked third for phishing Web sites during the period, accounting for five percent of all phishing Web sites detected. The prominence of Romania for phishing Web sites is indicative of the amount of Internet-fraud related activity originating there. Romania is not only prominent in phishing activity, but it ranks high (relative to its population) in various other forms of Internet-related fraud, including online auction fraud.

It has been speculated that the prominence of Romania in Internet fraud as well as other malicious activity is related to the culture surrounding computers there. In the social and intellectual climate in Romania, computer knowledge is viewed as very desirable and has been since the country was a satellite of the Soviet Union.145 As a consequence, a high proportion of computer users in Romania are technically knowledgeable and, thus, there exists the likelihood that a higher number of users there could be using their knowledge for malicious activity."

Among the other findings of the report, it is worth mentioning that Peru has the highest rate of malicious activity per broadband user, namely 9 percent which is quite high when talking about so dangerous activities. As expected, bank accounts and financial information are the most traded items on the underground market, representing 22 percent of all products advertised in this side of the industry.

And because botnets and infected computer couldn't miss, the United States has the largest number of bot-compromised systems with approximately 14 percent of the total number of affected computer. On the other hand, Madrid is the city with the most bot-infected computer with 3 percent.