Dubai: The UAE ranks 16th in Europe, Middle East and Africa and 33rd globally for botnets, according to security solutions provider Norton by Symantec. Ninety-five per cent of those botnets reside in Dubai.
A botnet is an interconnected network of devices infected with malware and used to carry out denial-of-service attacks (attacks which aim to take down a company’s website), send spam, and many other acts of cybercrime, without the user’s knowledge.
When comparing its number of bot-infections to its internet connected population, the UAE ranked 20 in EMEA for bot density. Regional neighbour, Kuwait, by comparison, had a much higher density of bots within its population of internet users, coming in at seventh place regionally.
Turkey, the subject of several attacks from hacktivist groups in 2015, had far and away the largest number of bots in EMEA. Turkey’s number of unique infections was almost double that of the nearest country. Fourth in the global rankings, Turkey made up 18.5 per cent of EMEA’s bot population and 4.5 per cent of the world.
Most of these infected computers reside in Istanbul (29 per cent of Turkey’s total bot population) and Ankara (28 per cent).
Lucrative sources
“The size of a bot population can depend on many factors, but markets and cities where there has been a recent uptick in high-speed, internet connected devices certainly creates new, lucrative sources of bandwidth for cybercriminals to compromise,” said Tamim Taufiq, Head of Norton Consumer Business Unit, Middle East.
But it’s not just infected PCs that are providing criminals with their robot army, he said and added that criminals are making increasing use of mobile and home connected devices, or the internet of things (IoT), and Macs to strengthen their botnet ranks.
Despite the number of missives from Nigerian princes about their financial woes, Nigeria is ranked 94th for bot density with one bot for almost every 2.1 million internet users.
African countries generally ranked fairly low for density of their bot populations among their internet users compared to their European and Middle Eastern counterparts, despite the comparatively smaller populations of internet users.
Russia, with the largest number of internet users in EMEA, had the ninth largest bot population, 37 per cent of which coming from Moscow. When comparing Russia’s bot population to its vast number of internet users it ranked 38, with one bot for every 9,060 people.
