30 August 2010 - India has overtaken the US as the single biggest producer of viruses, according to analysis of internet threats by managed security company, Network Box. India is now responsible for 13.74 per cent of the world’s viruses, up from 9.5 per cent in July. Russia is the next in line, producing just over 11 per cent of viruses - a jump from last month’s 4.01 per cent. The US accounts for just over eight per cent, a significant decrease from 14.65 per cent last month.

Virus levels from the UK have dropped to 2.5 per cent; down from five per cent last month. The UK is now the seventh-largest threat producing country in the world (down from fourth last month).

The highest number of firewall blocks come from the US (18.3 per cent) and Korea (13 per cent). Simon Heron, internet security analyst for Network Box, says: “It is interesting to see that UDP:137 (NetBIOS’ name service) was the second most attacked port. It is obviously worth users and businesses checking their firewall rules as these figures indicate that there must still be systems out there with this port open to the internet.  Also, it would appear that web proxies are also worth probing as TCP:8080 was third in the list, which suggests that hackers see this as another backdoor.”

Heron continues: “The country sources of these internet threats shifts each month, which shows how quickly internet criminals can move their operations round the world and launch attacks. Businesses need to be vigilant and ensure they are not opening up the back door to a hacker when they use new applications or technologies.  From this month’s statistics, it would appear that proxies are seen as vulnerable.”

For more information on security issues, see www.network-box.co.uk, or visit Simon Heron’s blog at: http://blog.network-box.co.uk/, or follow Simon on Twitter: http://twitter.com/networkbox.

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