According to Microsoft, among the 25 countries in the world that are most targeted with malware attacks, Thailand has been identified as one of the key countries within Asia-Pacific.
In Thailand, the prime targets are government websites. This observation is based on the recent assaults that Anonymous an international hacker group launched to object the single gateway scheme of the government.
Earlier in October, the website of the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology was down for several hours after the attack of the website by netizens to protest against the government’s planned launch of the single gateway to control access to all websites.
Thousands of internet users answered the call on social media and brought down at least three Thai government websites on Wednesday night by flooding them in a citizens’ “denial of service” attack.
Among the top 25 infected countries globally, eight of them are from Asia
The Thai Netizen Network and netizens opposed to the single gateway plan have urged netizens to simultaneously access to the ICT’s website at 10 pm by means of “DdoS” and press the F5 key on the keyboard for refresh.
According to security specialists, data breaches mean that every company loses approximately USD 3.5m.
In Asia, it is estimated that there are over 5 million IP addresses connected to millions of infected devices observed in the region, including India and China.
And among the top 25 infected countries globally, eight of them are from Asia. The Asian countries in the list are India, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Sri Lanka.
These are but just two of the latest findings shared by the team at Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU). In fact, according to the latest third-party studies and statistics, Asia Pacific is currently the most actively targeted region for cybercrime attacks.
As individuals and organisations in Thailand become more connected with their devices and information systems, they are also increasingly vulnerable to the exploits of cybercriminals seeking opportunities to steal private, financial and confidential data.
It therefore comes as no surprise that 79% of CIOs in Asia are concerned about security, privacy, transparency and compliance of cloud-related solutions in a recent survey by Microsoft.
According to Regional Director Keshav Dhakad for Intellectual Property and Digital Crimes at Microsoft, Thailand belongs to the list of 25 most malware-contaminated nations from the 200 polled, reported bangkokpost.com.
Accordingly, ransomware (malware which stops user’s access to his PC) and malware attacks represent the greatest of all cyber-crime attacks within Thailand.
In a statement by Mr. Dhakad, cyber-crime is most prominent in the Asia-Pacific region.
Meanwhile, University of Singapore along with International Data Corporation, of late, published a paper which estimated that end users of the Asia-Pacific region expended an aggregate of 360.6bn Thai Baht (10bn USD) for detecting, rectifying and regaining data as well as regaining from Internet-based ID-theft that occurred due to different kinds of malicious programs during 2014.
Also, as per the same study, lost data and pirated software within Asia-Pacific accounted for an USD 229bn loss for the corporate world.
Moreover, the total damage in monetary terms due to ransomware, malware as well as other kinds of cyber-assaults would increase some 15% per annum.
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