Russian hackers get a “gold medal” for fraud, but their Chinese counterparts carried out more than half of all the cybercrimes committed last year, according to Kaspersky Lab, Russia’s largest antivirus software developer.
About 52 percent of the 73 million attacks on the World Wide Web that Kaspersky recorded last year originated in China, the Moscow-based company said in its annual security report Tuesday.
“Chinese cybercriminals are capable of producing so much vicious software that in the past two years absolutely all the antivirus developers have had to deal with it,” Kaspersky said.
Chinese hackers are now the world’s best, trumping those from the United States, Germany, the Netherlands and Russia, although Russians retained the “gold medal” for fraud, Kaspersky said.
Russian hackers have mastered the mass-production of web sites that play upon users’ naivety and curiosity by offering services that purport to allow access to the e-mails and text messages of friends and family members, according to Kaspersky.
One successful scam invites users to send a free text message with a short code to receive passwords for private e-mail accounts, leading to charges on the victim’s cell phone bill, Kaspersky said.
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