Posted on Friday, May 28th, 2010 at 1:47 pm
Malware syndicates in China have been implicated in a number of recent high-profile, targeted cyber attacks against American companies and organizations, but the latest data from security software vendor Zscaler indicates a new and equally dangerous threat is emerging in South and Central America. To no one’s surprise, the Zscaler report pegs the U.S. as the leading source of malicious traffic including botnets, worms and aggravating SQL-injection attacks. What’s interesting is that when Zscaler analyzed each country based on the largest percentage of malicious versus benign servers, seven of the top 10 countries with high saturations of malware-distributing servers were South and Central American nations. Honduras checked in with a ratio of 7.5 percent, good enough (or bad enough, depending on how you view it) for second in the world behind only the Cayman Islands (10.2 percent). The rest of the Malware Top 10 included Bolivia (6.25 percent); Peru (6.11 percent); Argentina (6 percent); Paraguay (5.13 percent); Ecuador (5.05 percent); Columbia (4.54 percent); Luxembourg (4.47 percent) and Turkey (3.94 percent). Meanwhile, China checked in at just 2.96 percent, meaning that the concentration of malicious servers in countries like Honduras, Bolivia, Peru and Argentina is at least double that of those servers based in China.
