India is the eighth most prolific hacking country: Akamai report

If you have been following all the hacking news recently, you would have seen that most such stories say the hack originated from China. No, it’s not a conspiracy theory to indict the Chinese technophiles; China indeed is the world leader in hacking.

A report by Akamai Technlogies says the country deserve much of the blame for the spate of hack attacks late last year. The report lists the top ten countries where hacks originated in the last quarter of 2012. India was in eighth place with 2.3 percent of the world’s attack traffic coming from our country during the fourth quarter of last year. In fact, India’s share has decreased from 2.5 percent in the Q3 and 3 percent in comparison to the year-ago period.

The Northern Hemisphere has the majority of hackers (Image credit: Getty Images)

With 41 percent of all major hacking activity coming from China, the country is far and away the most prolific in that time period. When it comes to hacking, the top three nations are China, USA and Turkey. While China and USA can be considered cyber-attack powerhouses, Turkey accounted for 4.7 percent of the world’s attack traffic. In fact, Turkey’s share increased by nearly 10 percent over the previous quarter.

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At the bottom of the list is Hungary, which accounted for 1.4 percent of the cyber-attack traffic, narrowly beating out South Korea. Italy was placed in the ninth spot with 1.6 percent share, while Romania accounted for 2.8 percent of the world’s attack traffic and is placed in seventh place, with the town of Ramnicu Valcea notorious for being a bit of safe haven for cyber criminals. Brazil, sixth in rankings, is the only Southern Hemisphere country on the list and accounted for 3.3 percent of the world’s attack traffic.

Hackers from some countries carry out a lot of attacks, but consequently are also targetted by law enforcement authorities and ethical hackers. One such example, Taiwan accounts for 3.7 percent of hacks, but 12.7 percent of the computers in the country had been attacked by malware, a Sophos study found. Russia was fourth on the list with 4.3 hacking share. A recent attack on 40 companies, including Apple, Facebook and Twitter, is said to have originated from Russia.