Report Reveals Half of India Web Users Attacked by Local-Based Malware Threats

The clash of where malware comes from has drawn skepticism among security researchers and inquisitive minds recently as we all attempt to battle aggressive and emerging threats. The locality of where malware initiates has always been up for discussion and extensive examination by computer security researchers. In one particular report from Kaspersky Lab, it was determined that almost half of India web users are attacked by local malware where the region ranks 15th overall in the world for online dangers.

Kaspersky Lab released their second quarter Security Bulletin report explaining how from April to June of this year they detected an astonishing 19.9 million malware threats on computers of their security network in India. Of those systems, 35.6 percent of the users were attacked by web borne threats.

Within the network examined, about 5.39 million malware incidents on the same systems were rooted from their network in India. That is about 49.6 percent of users in India being attacked by threats during the short 3-month period.

One of the extremely surprising aspects of Kaspersky Lab's findings is that the numbers for mobile users is higher for exploitations. Much of the mobile malware examined in the study, were cases where apps were installed from 3rd party sites or questionable sources on the internet.

Some mobile apps accounting for being malicious have been found to have backdoor access programming allowing searching and locating of personal information of the user.

Another aspect of the profusion of India-based malware threats is the scenario of cybercrooks capitalizing on the threats leading to the compromise of online banking accounts. Mobile banking has been available in India for many years but not yet fully used by banking customers. Though, mobile banking infiltrations do occur allowing hackers to compromise accounts and wipe out banking account balances.

Some experts believe that a number of users in India fail to heed to malware warnings. The warnings are sometimes as simple as a homepage clearly stating that malicious software was detected. It could be that a massive number of India computer users do not follow the simple precautions and end up suffering the dire consequences once their system is infected or their online banking account is cleaned out.