A RECENT data from the Kaspersky Security Network (KSN) has showed that nearly four million Internet-borne threats were detected in computers of Kaspersky users based in the Philippines who surfed the web from October to December 2019.
This has placed the country in the top spot in Southeast Asia and seventh place worldwide in Kaspersky’s 2019 ranking, climbing six notches up from its 13th spot in the same period in 2018.
The KSN is a complex distributed infrastructure dedicated to intelligently process cybersecurity-related data streams from millions of voluntary Kaspersky users around the world.
From its fourth quarter report, a total of 3,906,410 web threats were found in the computers of Kaspersky users in the Philippines.
Meanwhile, the report also showed fewer local threat incidents among Kaspersky users in the country. These were malware attacks on computers from removable media such as USBs, CDs, DVDs and other “offline” methods.
The Philippines is currently at 64th place globally with only 8,998,044 detections in the fourth quarter of 2019, a significant drop from its 74th place with 11,757,863 detections in the same quarter in 2018.
Threat sources also went down to 76,900 incidents in the fourth quarter from 453,788 incidents in the same period in 2018. Threat sources are locations of detected malware shared from servers hosted in the Philippines.
Busy shopping period
The last quarter of the year covers the “ber-months” or the Christmas season in the Philippines.
For the past years, this is the time when Filipinos begin their online shopping sprees and becoming too active on social media reaching its peak in the holiday season in December.
“Being one of the world’s top Internet users, I think there’s no stopping the Filipinos from utilizing the web as a part of their modern way of life. We’re hoping that as they completely embrace this technology, so too will their practice of cyber hygiene as long as they go online,” said Mary Grace Sotayco, territory manager for the Philippines at Kaspersky.
“The significant drop in local threat infections tells us that there’s good news here. Filipinos are slowly understanding the risks, which the numbers reflect. We recognize the challenges which are almost similar across the region,” said Yeo Siang Tiong, general manager for Southeast Asia at Kaspersky.
“Shifting the mindset is a collective effort and we’ll continue doing our part in sharing our threat intelligence and expertise to the public and to our partners in the government and private sectors,” he added. (PR)