NEGOMBO – Malaysia is among the top five countries in the Asia Pacific (Apac) region with the most users affected by online threats, according to global cybersecurity company Kaspersky.
It said that from January to July 2024, more than a quarter of a billion online threats were detected in the Apac region.
Kaspersky Global Research and Analysis Team director Igor Kuznetsov said online threats refer to users encountering a form of online threat through online downloads from the Internet and phishing.
He said the Philippines topped the list with 39.4% of users affected, while Malaysia ranks fourth with 31.4%.
“This is followed by Nepal (36.8%), Sri Lanka (34.9%), Malaysia (31.4%) and New Zealand (30.9%),” he said in a presentation at Kaspersky Apac Cybersecurity Weekend 2024, here today.
Kuznetsov said that Kaspersky also detected more than 340 million local threats, which refers to detection by downloading files from external media such as pen drives on computers or mobile devices.
“Regarding users affected by local threats detected on mobile devices, Myanmar tops the list and ranks eight globally with 49.8%, followed by Vietnam (46.1%), China (43.8%), Nepal (43.8%) and Laos (40.4%),” he said.
Kuznetsov added that more than two million password stealers, over one million ransomware attacks, and more than 7.5 million general backdoors were among the threats detected.
“From the online threats, we prevented more than 60 million remote desktop protocol (RDP) attacks,” he added.
Meanwhile, Kaspersky reported that about 22% of users in Apac encountered mobile threats, with more than 16% being mobile password stealers.
“Out of the 16%, about 15% were bank trojans, which means they (stealers) could have stolen money from the users.
“Of all these detections for this year, most came from Taiwan, with 51.67%, followed by China (17.04%) and India (9.88%),” he said. – August 5, 2024