2011 H1 study reveals France and United States were countries most affected

SYDNEY & AUCKLAND – June 20, 2011 – BitDefender, an award-winning provider of innovative Internet security solutions, announces the publication of its H1 2011 E-Threat Landscape Report, a comprehensive study regarding worldwide malware, spam and phishing trends. In terms of producing and hosting malware, China is found to be number one, accounting for more than 31 percent, followed by Russia with almost 22 percent and Brazil with more than 8 percent.

The report presents an in-depth analysis of the security threat landscape over the last six months, between January and June 2011, and also provides predictions for the coming months. The countries that were most affected by online threats were France and the United States, which accounted for more than 25 percent of the global malware incidents logged by BitDefender.

During the first six months of 2011, more than 500,000 computers in France have been exposed to various families of malware, ranging from average rogue antivirus scanners to devastating malware such as the Sality or Downadup families.

“BitDefender predicts that mobile malware will increase by 400 percent throughout the remainder of 2011. On top of that, we estimate a 30 percent increase of unique samples of PC malware. Most of these e-threats will be related to the emergence of the first technical previews of Windows 8,” said Catalin Cosoi, head BitDefender’s online threats lab. “In terms of botnets and corporate security, we are expecting at least one major data breach to transpire somewhere around the world each month.”

Another important conclusion of the research is that 50 percent of the most important malware threats distributed worldwide consisted of Trojans. Furthermore, casino spam is on the rise as the Sality-supported Maazben botnet increases. In terms of social engineering scams, the top phished institutions and services during the first half of the year were PayPal, eBay and World of Warcraft.

The study was conducted through BitDefender’s worldwide users, and surveyed the most critical aspects of data security in conjunction with internet use, social networking and recent major corporate breaches.

The full report is available here.

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