Bangladesh fourth among countries most at risk from malware

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

The Malware Infection Index 2016 revealed the locations with the highest malware encounter rates in Asia were Pakistan, followed by Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nepal and Vietnam respectively.

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 4th quarter of 2015, up from 17.6 percent in the first quarter of 2015.

Out of the top five locations across the globe most at risk of infection, a total of four are from the Asia Pacific — Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Nepal, topping the rankings at first, second, fourth and fifth places respectively in terms of computers encountering malware.

In fact, the Windows Defender Advanced Threat Hunting team in April reported the discovery of a group of cybercriminals, dubbed Platinum, who have actively since 2009 been targeting governmental organizations, defense institutes, intelligence agencies, and telecommunication 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.

It is commonly distributed via exploit kits and social engineering and has been observed to steal information from the local computer and communicate with command-and-control servers managed by attackers.

It is particularly prevalent in Mongolia, with 35 computers infected out of every 1,000 running the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) in 2H 2015.

Keshav Dhakad, regional director, Intellectual Property and Digital Crimes Unit, 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 organizations to find out that they have been victims of cyberattacks.”

Dhakad said they are noticing that four key common IT environment issues.

Firstly, the usage of IT assets which are old, unprotected, or are non-genuine in nature, secondly, unmanaged and unregulated IT assets usage, procurement and maintenance.

Thirdly, poor cyberhygiene of users and negligent employee behaviour inside companies. Fourthly, the inability of the companies to timely monitor, detect and remove modern cyber threats, among others, are some of the common causes for cybercrime risks.

Malware Infection Index 2016 (MII2016) identified the key malware threats in the region and ranks markets in Asia Pacific according to how much they are affected.