Despite the numbers that finger the United States as the guiltiest nation in regards to malware, a report recently released by Symantec indicates that Chinese cyber criminals are responsible for more malware than any other nation.
Despite the numbers that finger the United States as the guiltiest nation in regards to malware, a report recently released by Symantec indicates that Chinese cyber criminals are responsible for more malware than any other nation. While a majority of the malware comes from servers in the U.S., when Symantec investigated the actual IP addresses that the malware originated from, it traced most of them back to China. The report shows that 28.2 percent of all malware comes from IP addresses in China. Romania with 21.1 percent and the U.S. with 13.8 percent round out the top three. "A large proportion of targeted attacks are sent from legitimate webmail accounts which are located in the U.S. and therefore, the IP address of the sending mail server is not a useful indicator of the true origin of the attack," Paul Wood, a senior analyst at Symantec's MessageLabs Intelligence, said. Chinese malware has become a major problem globally. Google recently announced that it will no longer censor search results after an attack was traced back to two Chinese schools. The nation's government denies any role in the attack, but the target of the measure - two human rights activists - may prove otherwise.
