Bangladesh at high risk

Bangladesh is fourth among countries most at risk of malware threats, according to Malware Infection Index 2016 of Microsoft Asia.

The index released yesterday listed Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nepal and Vietnam as Asia-Pacific countries with the highest malware encounter rates.

Each country had an average of close to 40 percent or more computers encountering malware, compared to the worldwide average of only 20.8 percent, as of the fourth quarter of 2015, up from 17.6 percent in the first quarter of the same year.

In fact, the Windows Defender Advanced Threat Hunting team in April reported the discovery of a group of cybercriminals, dubbed Platinum, who since 2009 have actively been targeting governmental organisations, defence institutes, intelligence agencies, and telecom service providers in South and Southeast Asia.

The top three most-encountered malware families in the Asia Pacific region were Gamarue, a worm which can give a malicious hacker control of your PC; and Trojans Skeeyah and Peals, which can steal personal information, download more malware or give hackers access to your PC.

Gamarue is particularly prevalent in the ASEAN region and was the third most commonly encountered malware family worldwide in 2H 2015.

Certain heavily affected locations such as Indonesia reported Gamarue encounter rates of over 20 percent in 4Q 2015, close to the worldwide encounter rates for all threat families combined for the quarter.

Keshav Dhakad, regional director of Intellectual Property and Digital Crimes Unit at Microsoft Asia, said: “The rising sophistication and targeted cyber attacks are causing devastating disruption and losses of data and information across all computer and internet user segments. In fact, it generally takes on average up to 200 days for organisations to find out that they have been victims of cyber attacks.”

Malware Infection Index 2016 identified the key malware threats in the region and ranks markets in Asia Pacific according to how much they are affected.